140: Safety Unscripted Pt. 2: Your Questions, Expert Answers

Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode is recorded May 26, 2026. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. As a EHS professional, have you ever wished there was some kind of hotline where you could call a certain number and EHS professionals would be on standby to answer any question you had? Well, earlier this year, my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Todd Loushine, who's associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and I did exactly that. It wasn't really a calling show per se. Rather, it was a webinar where any EHS professional could ask us anything about EHS they wanted and we answered what we could as fast as we could. Hundreds of questions came through the registration and during the live event. We sorted like with like and tried to answer bulk questions where we could. It was fun and a little intimidating. As podcast listeners, I bet many of you have the same kind of questions. So we're sharing portions of the webinar recording with all of you here for this special episode of the podcast. Enjoy. Thanks, Christie. Appreciate it. And thanks for everybody who's here today. My name is Jill James. I'm Chief Safety Officer here at HSI. And with me today, I have my friend of 32 years, Dr. Todd Loushine. He is associate professor at the Department of Occupational, Environmental Health and Safety at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. And so as Christie said, we did part one about a month ago. Here we are back again together. So if you're returning, thanks for coming back. And if you're new, we're going to just jump into what's going to happen today. So go ahead, Christie. Yeah, so Christie had mentioned that you sent in so many questions when you registered and wow, thank you. Thank you, thank you. So many great questions. And so the checkboxes that you see on the screen right now are the topics that we covered in the first part one of this. And today we're going to be covering the questions that are in the categories number one through four. Five, six, and seven we'll cover at a part three that'll be coming up as well. So today, like Christie said, you sent in so many questions, we sifted through all of them and tried to thematically categorize them. So for the first 40 minutes of our session together today, we'll be going through number one through four. And then for the last 15 to 20 minutes of our session together, we'll be going and taking any questions that you want to put into the Q&A live and we'll answer as many as we can rapid fire questions that way. Todd, what did you have to say about

Dr. Todd Loushine:

This? Yeah, thank you for preparing for this. One thing I want to let people know, because I believe just giving you the answer isn't enough, but how to approach it and solve things on your own, that's the old Phish analogy, that the way you approach a problem, how you define it, how you frame it, really either dictates or limits the solutions you may come up with. So I think one thing we're going to try to do is be more comprehensive, be more objective as we approach some of these questions and then try to provide you with some of the resources we go to in order to find answers. So just I want to keep that in mind because we're getting into some pretty complex questions this week and so the way we respond may be reframing the problem or adding more questions than answers. Sorry, Jill, go ahead.

Jill James:

No, I mean, that's right. And that is Professor Loushine speaking. That makes complete sense. Wonderful. Thank you. All right, let's dig into our first section. So our first section is about safety, culture engagement and behavior change. And we needed to subdivide that. So we subdivided it into what we're calling employee engagement. So that's our first category. And you'll see the flood of questions on the screen. We really want to honor the fact that, yeah, you really did ask these questions. We're not going through every single one of them at a time. In general, we're going to try to capture the spirit of many of the questions that you asked, but we wanted you to know we read them, we read every single one of them. So when it comes to employee engagement, I guess I wanted to start as my mind always thinks about EHS and Todd, I know yours does too, but I always start from the compliance perspective. So what does employee engagement mean from the compliance perspective and what's the employer's responsibility? Sometimes in my 32 years, I get questions like, how can I make people obey or I can't make them do something What is within the scope of my practice as an EHS professional? And so I really want to talk about the fact that you can lean into compliance and the expectation of every employer is to provide a safe place of employment for their employee. And so that means ensuring that employees are following your safety rules. They are doing what you said and following those rules in the same way that they would follow rules for showing up to work on time or not missing a day of work, those kind of things. So there isn't an opt-out like, "I tried my best, I can walk away from this. " It's really having those policies and procedures in place that employees must follow with ramifications if they don't. Another thing that I wanted to talk about in employee engagement, and we might come back to this again is incentive programs. People ask a lot about incentive programs and do they build employee engagement? They can, but really you need to be careful with those. When Todd and I worked for OSHA, we would be asked often or we were asking often, "Do you have an incentive program?" And if the incentive program was everybody gets a company jacket if we don't have injuries for two quarters or something like that, that was a red flag to us in terms of a way to incentivize employees not to report things that were happening to them on the job. So can incentive programs be good if they are advancing safety initiatives in your workplace, if they're advancing innovations that employees that are driven from employees, those kind of things can be good. If we wanted to dig into the balls of the Federal OSHA website on incentive programs they've written about this as well, but I just wanted to make sure that if that's something you're doing in your company, really think about the pitfalls and precautions before you start something and think about, is this something that's incentivizing employees or not? And then I guess the last thing that I wanted to say about employee engagement for our past to you, Todd, is how can we make EHS personal and familial in the workplace? How can we do that as practitioners? And some of the ways I've seen that done in my career and the first one I think of always is lockout tagout on the tags for actual lockout tagout. I remember early in my career seeing pictures of the individual employee on the tag that says, "My life is on the line." So when someone is looking at a lock in a tag and you see all the locks and tags for a particular thing, you can see all the faces of all the people who are involved in that particular lockout/tagout scenario. And I just love that it made it personal and familial. And I've also had a company tell me that during a company picnic where they had all kinds of families show up, children of employees made all these posters about their parent or the family member who worked at a particular area and then they took all of those posters and they fastened them to the ceiling above the time clock. And so every day when employees were coming in to check in, they could see their family's pictures from their kids. And the incentive with that was, "Hey, I'm coming here for my family so I can provide for my family. I want to come back the same way and we're not just, I want to go home the same way that I arrived and we're not just widgets here doing something." And then I guess I'll leave you with explaining the why behind safety things. Don't make assumptions with employees that everybody should know that this is a live electrical wire or that you need three points of contact on a ladder What is the reason behind things? What is the reason the guard on the shear has to be super close to the working material or really far away? What is the reasoning behind that? Because employees don't know the things that we know. Todd, what do you have to say about engagement?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Okay. So just a lot of these talk about how to get people engaged or how to conclude people or how to evolve them to get them to be more involved. And going back to Jill, our beginnings with OSHA, we believe employee participation was, oh, they went to training, they went on a safety committee, something like that, but it's much more involved than that. And I know that early on we're also sold the idea that if people were engaged and did things right, they tended to be happier. I went to graduate school to study this stuff, you guys, it doesn't work that way. You have to make that personal connection first, gain trust, have open communication, then you can get engagement. I think it's really almost like the 30, 30, 30 rule, which doesn't equal to 100%, but you know what I'm talking about, third, third, that there's a third of people who are very extroverts and they want to get involved and they enjoy that. They get enjoyment. There's the bottom that no matter what you do, it's like pulling teeth. They don't want to. So only in certain circumstances will they. And in the middle, they're on the fence. They'll go either way depending on which way the wind is blowing and whether it's cloudy or sunny. But so when it comes to getting people engaged, it all begins with going on and just talking to them and making personal connections. Some people will not want to engage with you and it may take some time and effort. Others will run up to you. You have to also understand it from their perspective. That's part of the engagement. As you engage with them, get to know them. What's important to them? So when it comes to the first question on the screen here, how do you get them when they're ignoring? Why are they doing it? Is it something that they're choosing to do or more likely is it something that's external? Either a learned response from coworkers or they were treated unfairly or unjustly with an interaction with a supervisor or management. And you also- But

Jill James:

They don't understand.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Yes, exactly. Yes. They were trained, but they didn't connect to the training. They've seen other people violate the rules and you didn't do anything about it. So why should they? So there's a lot of things that ... It's more complex than you know. And I, in preparation for this particular slide, was searching some of the main American Psychological Association journals. And I can't go over it right now. It is so vast. There's so many things that go into how people think, the attitudes they have, and then therefore their behavior. And so there is no silver bullet, there's no magic trick. I wish there was because I love Harry Potter. Engagemento and then everything would be great. But it all starts with just good on talking to them and getting to know them and learning yourself. What may be inhibiting them. Sorry, go ahead, Jim.

Jill James:

Yeah. I'm thinking for anyone who's listening is like, "Oh great, but I have 15,000 employees. How do I do that to scale?" How do we do that to scale? And that's where we really need to empower our leaders, foremen, the supervisors. They have to be the person that's going, the people that are going to carry that water with us and for us. And that's where a lot of that engagements things start, that your inspiration for them has to be paramount so that you can do it to scale.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Yes. And I mean, there's perception surveys you can do to get at least sort of a heat map of where issues might be when it comes to perception of things and how people are feeling. And you can make them semi autonomous so that ... Is that the right word? Anonymity. You can probably anonymity. M, I'm coming up with words now, but the other is the psychology of people. We tend to be very hedonistic. And I don't mean that in a pejorative or sexual orientation type of thing. We do seek pleasure and we do try to avoid pain. And if people feel that engaging is painful, they won't do it. And so what you have to do is you have to find a good bridge or connection and then try to get them. So like Jill had said, if you've got 15,000 people, you have to engage people within those environments who'll go and teach them to go and talk to people and then bring you some of their input so you can come up with messaging that they can connect with. Yeah.

Jill James:

Yeah. Let's move on. Let's move on and continue with ... No, this is good. This is good. So moving on to safety culture and behavior change. Yeah, thank you. Look at the questions you ask here. Amazing. Thank you all so much. Todd mentioned a moment ago safety assessments. And again, let's start with some of these really basic things. So there are safety assessments out there. They can be really expensive. They can be hundreds of questions long. You'll hear the professor in just a moment wax poetic on that one. But know that a number of years ago, Todd and I created an engagement survey together and it'll be shared with you on the landing page that we'll show you at the end with a lot of resources we've created for today. And it's really short and it's free for you to use, but it's looking at the perceptions of the employee and the perceptions of their leadership and do they match up or do they not? And in the places where there's the gaps or the places that we have opportunities to work. I also mentioned a moment ago about getting supervisors, managers, middle level leaders involved and that how do you start with that? Maybe the one place that you start is simply asking them if every time they get their employees together, if they ask a question about safety, "Hey, what have you been doing with safety this week? How is safety impacting your job today?" Just like talking about it outside of like, what are the special projects you're doing? Okay, what sort of safety things do we need to do? What sort of policies, what sort of procedures, what kind of equipment, what kind of things, and getting those leaders to be able to do that as well. Yeah. There's a question in there about safety as a nuisance. Yeah. I mean, that's not new to any of us. That is how often our jobs are perceived. It's our job as the professional. It's our job as the EHS professional to change that perception and change that narrative. That's on us to do with leadership. That is on us.That's what we're here to be able to do. And then I just want to talk about behavior-based safety and I'm kind of teeing Todd up because Todd, I know you're going to want to talk about some of these things. We both have a friend, Dr. Geller, who is the person who coined that term behavior-based safety and he doesn't even use it anymore because it's gotten so bastardized. And I know that in my professional practice, I'm often asked, "Can I take a course? Can I send my employees to a course on behavior-based safety as if some sort of training course is going to change the way that people behave?" And we know that that's not the case. We know that we're reinforcing behaviors and we're giving people the information and training policies and procedures and tools they need to be able to perform their job the way they need to perform their job. We're not going to give them a one-stop training course that's going to make them have the behaviors we want. Todd, go for it, professor.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

First. Okay. So first, so redefining the issue and understanding it, Jill and I both kind of agree on this. We don't like the term safety culture because it brings in a whole truckload of assumptions that people really don't understand. Safety culture was born out of the Trenoble disaster investigation team. They came up with it. They made it up and we've been chasing this phantom for years. Here's the bad thing though. Safety culture, when the CEO stands in front of their workers and say, "We've got a strong safety culture." Now the workers are like, "Oh, maybe I can't report things now because we're perfect." Or you have the zero goal. You guys can keep using it if you want. I don't like it. I like learning culture. I want everybody to try to explore to understand things better, to educate and share with each other and to strive for continuous improvement. And I don't think that the connotation of safety culture does that, but okay, get off your horse, Todd. Behavioral based safety That was born out of Heinrich's pyramid, not his pyramid, his causation ratio, which he said 90% of all accidents are caused by human or unsafe behaviors. But the thing is, if you turn the page in one of his books, I've got three of them behind me here, he basically says that he overemphasized that the workers' unsafe behaviors were causing it. And the other thing too is we tend to blame the worker. That's called attribution error. So what you really need to do is people need to connect. When given a choice between doing it safe or getting something done, a worker by their title is going to get the work done. And so therefore it's upon us to try and understand what's inhibiting them or what's allowing them to favor the avoidance of doing the safe thing, the unrisky thing. And then if we can integrate it more into the work, the better. And Jill brought up a really important point. The fulcrum for whether things work or not is the supervisor, the line supervisor. They're there twenty four seven. They're really focused on people, their daily, their tactical things they're doing. If you can get them involved in understanding what needs to get done and how it needs to get done and what to do if things are deviating, you have a much better chance of trying to integrate it in. And also somebody that talked about bringing baked goods to get people to be safer, that's considered an extrinsic reward. Extrinsic rewards have very short-term non-sustainable behavioral change intrinsic do. That's the Hertzberg motivation hygiene model, something from the '70s that when people are recognized for the work they do and they're given a, they call them attaboys. I'm sorry, I don't like to use that term, a pat on the back.

Jill James:

Acknowledgement.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Acknowledgement. Yeah. Personal pride in doing something, that seems to be much more sustainable. And then there was that work by drive, Dan Pink, that people like to succeed. They want to succeed as long as the issue of being compensated fairly is off the table. Go ahead, Joe.

Jill James:

No, I was just going to wrap up this segment By Todd said that he and I don't like the term safety culture. Correct, we don't. Todd said he prefers learning culture and if learning culture seems a little bit difficult for you, corporate culture. What is our corporate culture? Safety is a subset of corporate culture. Maybe our other pieces of our corporate culture are meeting our KPIs or doing things well for the environment and the common good and the community, but corporate culture, not so much the safety culture piece. But hey, that's our opinion, but we don't believe in silos when it comes to safety. We believe these things are intertwined and woven within the fabric of a company.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Right. And using the term safety culture, I believe silos safety and that's the opposite of what you want to be doing.

Jill James:

Right, right. Okay. Moving on to accountability. Accountability. Yeah. Again, I'll start out here by thinking about this from the compliance perspective. So from a compliance perspective, how do we look at accountability? Our job as EHS professionals is ensuring the base of their rights under the OSHA laws. Employees have a right to a safe work environment. They have a right to bring problems to their employer and if their employer doesn't address them, they have their right to bring it to an enforcement agency like state or federal OSHA. That's our job to explain to employees. In the years that Todd and I were investigators with OSHA and we would respond to complaints that employees had filed against their company, the employers would always be so annoyed and sometimes angry. And the question we'd ask them back was, did the employee know they could come to you first? Did the employee know, what is the mechanism you have in place for employees to come to the employer first so they didn't feel like they had to go to the government? And is that being communicated clearly? And I know that can sound like, gosh, do we really want to tell them they can complain to the government? Yeah. If you have mechanisms in place that employees can feel safe to do that, to come to you first, then letting them know that like, "Hey, last resort, if we're really screwing up here, you can go to this direction." And they also should know what the employer's rights are as well. What is the duty of the employer? And all those things are on the OSHA poster and that's really ground zero. And then if you happen to have unionized place of employment to explain to employees what the role of the union is as well, working in concert with you for the safety of employees. So disciplinary actions, we talked about that at the beginning of the session together. Think about not separating. So when we think about silos, don't separate like HR policies from safety policies. If you have a policy for HR that says if you miss three days of work or you checked in three days late, then X is going to happen. Same sort of policy can be in place for safety things as well. You don't have to have silos within your organization and those things should be communicated with employees. So when I think about that, I think of a fatality case I investigated many years ago where it was a recycling company, a recycling company that goes house to house to pick up people's recycling and in those days they had a trailer that the employees would get out of the vehicle, they would sort hand sort the recycling and put it in these things in a trailer. And the company had a policy, a safety policy that said when you're driving from house to house, the employees on that crew can either get in the truck and ride to the next house or they can walk with their feet on the street to the next house. They can never ride on the back of the trailer. And so I'm called to investigate a fatality where the employee had ridden on the back of the trailer, slipped off the back, hit their head in the street and died. And I was called to do that inspection. And so I was asking the employer to show me their policies, their procedures, the things they had in writing. I said, "Did you have anything in writing that informed the employee that they couldn't ride on the trailer?" And they said, "Yes, it's right here." They showed me the receipts and I said, "Did this employee or has any employee ever broken that safety rule before?" And they said, "Yes." And I said, "Can you show me the receipts?" And they could. And that was a company that I did not levy any citations against because they had those policies in place and that had been that employee's third time. I want to make sure that as I'm telling this story, you're not getting the impression that employees set out to hurt themselves. This is something Todd talks about all the time. People don't show up to work and hope that they get an injury. They don't do that. And I'm sure that this individual didn't do that either, but it's on us as EHS professionals to have those kind of policies in place to protect ourselves as well. Todd, what did you want to say about accountability here?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

There's a lot here. Now, I tend to take a do not blame initially approach to things because I want to try to understand what went into it so I can actually create an effective mitigation strategy versus just blame the worker because there's all sort of negative connotations that come from that. If someone's trying to do a good job, but it happened to slip up and you've allowed them to do it before and all of a sudden they feel like they've been blamed and they've been trying to do the right thing, they're going to detach from the workplace. So every situation really deserves its own individual assessment of why somebody's doing something, but I want to give props to Dominic Cooper who is always on LinkedIn railing against this blameless because I'm not saying blameless. I'm saying because there was a study done in the oil fields or the oil rigs in England that they took some blameless approach to safety and it was actually negative because the workers who are doing hard to do the right thing and seeing that the people who are not doing the right thing are not being acknowledged for it and so therefore their commitment decreased. So you have to really understand what the requirements are, how they're going to be measured, how people are going to be approached and documented should they deviate from what is expected. If it's common that people deviate so it's work is done versus work as planned, you got to fix that first. Everybody who really has to understand what's going on, they have to understand when a violation has occurred and understand that there is a response to that, whether it's discipline or whatever it might be, but you have to define that stuff first. So just coming in, I don't like it when people are like, "Oh, you do this wrong. We're going to fire you. " People aren't going to want to work there and basically they're just going to keep to themselves. You want people to succeed, help them succeed in a way that keeps them safe and hopefully they elicit satisfaction in the work they do.

Jill James:

Yeah. Know what is expected and why. Yeah, exactly. Good. All right. So moving on, you asked a lot of questions about career growth, certifications, how do I develop myself as a professional? And we want you to know that Todd and I are currently working on an upcoming webinar that we'll share about at the end today called Safety Impostor. Todd attended a conference last year where a lot of people were saying, "Hey, I think I might be a safety imposter." And we're trying to unwind, what does that even mean? And how do I look at myself professionally and in my career development? So we'll be talking about some of those things in an upcoming webinar. When I think about my career growth, and Todd and I talked about this as we were prepping, what did we wish we would've maybe learned faster 32 years in this career that would've helped our career? And for me, it's understanding EHS, yes, okay, got that, have the education. But what I didn't know until many years into my career were business practices. Where does the whole EHS and business practices join? How do businesses set budgets? How do they make decisions? How do they come up with KPIs? What are KPIs? I didn't even know key performance indicators when I first started and what are corporate goals and how can I align The work that I'm doing in EHS with the overall corporate goals and really understanding how to weave myself into the business practices and the initiatives that the company is trying to reach. Those are things that I wish that I would've had. Todd, do you want to talk about what you wish you would've?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Yeah. I started out my career really focused on OSHA record keeping and their data and the calculation of incidents rates and the comparison to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And now a lot of my work has said that that stuff isn't what I thought it was or what people think it is. I really wish I'd spent more time with workers' compensation data and understanding that. Yeah, that's about what I'll say. Can I answer a couple of these questions real quick? Yeah,

Kristi McClure:

Sure, sure.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

So there's a question about, please, I want to know how to enroll in NEBOSH. So I did a little search for that. And just to let you guys know, so over in the UK or maybe in all of Europe, there's NEBCOSH, which is the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health, which I kind of liken to the board of certified safety professionals. So it's a more academic, more higher level practice, like director, VP level type stuff. There's more commitment, more money to get to pursue it. And then there's IOSH, which is the Institute of Occupational Health Safety and Health, which is more of like ASSP. So there's more training there. You can get certificates and things like that, but it's more of a membership. Now some of you are like, well, what is OSHA? Well, OSHA is HSE over there. Health and safety, I believe executive. That's their regulatory board, at least out of the UK. So please, I want to enroll, look up nevash. Whatever and you'll find it. I found it right away. Nebash.org.uk.

Jill James:

Yeah. We wanted to share with you a tool that a friend of ours came up with. If you want to go to the next slide, Christie. Our friend and the next president of ASSP, Monique Parker, came up with this career map for herself and we've been sharing it at presentations. And some of your questions were like, how can I advance myself? How can I increase my knowledge base? How can I increase my salary? That kind of thing. And Monique had created this career map that's really taking a look at what have I done in the past? And this is an easy map. And if you're screenshotting it, don't worry. It's in the resources page that we're going to give you at the end where you can fill in your own data and it has instructions in it. So just take a look at the screen right now. So it's looking like, where have I been? What was that role? What sort of things did I need to know to be able to do that role? What skills did I obtain while I was in that particular job? And then move on to the next one and the next one as you're looking at your career and then assessing where am I right now?What does the situation look like right now? And then the next piece is that future casting. Where do I want to go? What do I want this career to look like? And then filling in the blanks and thinking really about, is there other education I need to obtain to get there? Are there other certifications I need to obtain to get there? What kind of skills as I'm doing my digging around and researching on a VP level role or whatever it is, the role that you want to aspire to next, what sort of skills am I going to need to be able to get there? And then how can I build those skills and what are those opportunities? Todd, anything you want to add about the career map?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

No, you really covered it well. Monique did a fantastic job. I have sort of a rule of thumb. People ask me a lot about, should I go after this certification? Should I go after this degree? What should I do? And here's sort of my rule of thumb. The easier it is to get and so the less time, resources, put it, probably the less value it is. Whereas there are things that maybe cost a litle bit more, take a little bit more time, take a lot more effort and maybe require recertification or renewal over time. Those tend to be more esteemed and have more in depth to it. And then as far as like what do I need to have to get to this level? Hiring managers have no idea what we do. And so they basically ask for what they ... They want to bring in people who've done exactly what they want them to do at their plant. And that seems to be the rule of thumb unless you find ... But the letters behind the name always help. So do as you do. That's what I'll say. Sorry.

Jill James:

All right. So we'll tackle our last of the themed questions before we take your questions live. So if you want to start typing questions into the Q&A, you absolutely can. I know Todd's been answering things as we've been moving along, but this last section is on the current regulatory landscape and future of safety, future of OSHA. And I'll start out by saying in the 32 years that Todd and I have been doing this, we have watched and seen the impacts of different administrations on the federal level, meaning the presidential level and its impact on federal OSHA. We've seen and observed the same thing with governors in states where there are state OSHA plans and there are ebbs and flows with every single administration and things always look a little bit differently. And so when we look back at the landscape of our careers, we know what was emphasized or de- emphasized. There were administrations and governors that were into more rulemaking or greater enforcement versus sometimes there's less enforcement, lesser of rulemaking. I worked under a governor once who was all about data. They wanted to have as many inspections done as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible. There was no emphasis on doing quality inspections. It was like, go out, find one thing to cite, get your butt out of there and go on to the next one so that our data looks really good about how much we're doing. And that's just a fact of what happens differently with different administrations. So that doesn't mean that we do our jobs differently as EHS professionals. Our job is always to do the best that we can for the employees that we're serving and to advance our profession. And so if there aren't particular governmental levers that are being emphasized in a particular season of your career, then you lean into other things. You can lean into, why are we doing this is because of insurance rates. Why are we doing this? It's so that we can do well in insurance audits and that we are more insurable because our incident rates, our experience rates are down. Maybe it's because you have a place of employment that is funded by granting agencies and granting agencies are giving you money based on what are your EHS practices and can those things be yanked if you have problems or maybe you are complying with industry groups that you're part of, or maybe you have ISO certifications that you're working for. And so the lever of federal and state governments, yes, that pendulum swings. We always want to do best for employees and there's always different levers that we can pull if we need evidence to prove to employers why we need to do the things that we need to do. Todd, what did you want to say about this piece?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

So I've been sort of analyzing OSHA citations to industries and penalty amounts and they updated it October 1st, even though they were on a shutdown, they still updated, kind of upset me, but they did it anyway. And I found that the numbers went down considerably for the 2025 fiscal. And Jill and I have seen a few articles that the enforcement activity is down a litle bit. Is it a directive? Probably not. I mean, if I was working for the government and they're shutting down and they're saying we're not doing a good job, I may take advantage of the open market right now because I'm seeing so many safety jobs open right now and saying that you would have some experience with OSHA always held, especially with the entry to mid-level. Going to the website and I think Jill had talked about signing up for- No,

Jill James:

I hadn't yet.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Go ahead. But in December, OSHA came out with seven letters of interpretation, which you can look up and they've got this new thing called Safety Champions, which if you open it to the main OSHA homepage, it's right there. That's all we're really seeing you guys. I don't think there's going to be much in the way of changing of regulations. Jill and I are very happy to see that they're not deleting things from the website. We're also still seeing NIOSH. They're funded where they have people working again. Chemical Safety Board are funded. We still have access to their resources. So like Jill had said, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I mean, really OSHA compliance is the minimum. Start there and build from it.

Jill James:

Yeah. And in terms of we get this question a lot like, how do I keep up with OSHA? Aren't things happening so fast all the time? And the answer is it doesn't. I mean, government just works at a glacial pace. It really does. And there's always advanced notice if they're going to make a change. Nothing happens overnight. Things that are new take months to years to put in place. So there's a couple ways you can watch that. And Christie, if you wouldn't mind bringing up the OSHA website for the next one, the quick takes. If you want to sign up for newsletters, OSHA has newsletters and you see this on the screen right now. We can provide you some links with that. She's hovering over the subscribe now. So they put out a newsletter all the time. You can read past newsletters and that's where you can keep up with anything that might be happening that's new. And if you're really nerdy and you want to look at legislation that's being proposed or maybe legislative changes, we can go to the federal register. And Todd, do you want to talk about this piece?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Oh, you just caught me off guard. I mean, this is where you can actually search and follow the changes they're making to the federal register. This is what they say. We've got a comment period that will say, "This is how we want to change some language in one of the standards." This is the horse's mouth, honestly. And this is actually, you'll read it here before you even see it in OSHA takes or on the OSHA website.

Jill James:

Right. This is the nerdiest of nerdiest pieces. If you want to take a deep dive, when Todd and I first started our career and OSHA would make changes, they would send us literal paper copies in the mail of something that was changed, or they would send us a note that says, "Strike these three words out of here and insert this word instead." That's the kind of level that you'll see in the federal register. So new things and then things that are being modified or changed as well. I think the last thing that maybe we wanted to talk about on this piece was the difference between ANSI standards and

Dr. Todd Loushine:

OSHA

Jill James:

Standards. When the OSHA regulations were conceived of back in 1970, it wasn't like a think tank of people sat down and decided to hammer out all of the 1910 and 1926 in the maritime regulations. What they did at that time was they went to organizations that we call consensus building places. So ANSI, the American National Standards Institute or the National Electric Code or the National Fire Protection Agency, all of those places they already existed at that time and we call them consensus building because they didn't have any enforcement teeth. So the people who were coming up with OSHA, a firetruck is just going past my house right now. I'm seeing that folks. It's not stopping here. Okay, in real time. So the people who came up with the OSHA regulations went to ANSI, went to the NFPA, went to NEC, went to those kind of consensus places and kind of cherry-picked what's going to end up in the OSHA regulations. And that's where those things came from. And if you want to get really nerdy and dig into footnotes, you can see this one came from here. It was adopted in 1974 or 1983 or whatever it was. Anything you wanted to say about that piece, Todd?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

No, just ANSI standards are consensus standards. They're updated more frequently. They're more international. They're considered best practices. OSHA standards are only US used, but I mean, you can refer to them because they're free to get at ANSI you have to pay for. I was just trying to find out how much it costs to get an ANSI membership so you can get access to their full library, but there are tiers for the different membership. So if I was out working, that's something I'd try to get my employer to pay for. So instead of paying for each individual standard, you have access to all of them. I think that's a better use, better use of your investment. That's all I got.

Jill James:

All right, questions. I think we're ready to take questions from you. If you want to put anything into the Q&A, you absolutely absolutely encourage you to do that. No question is silly or-

Dr. Todd Loushine:

I've been answering as we ... We're all caught up at this moment.

Jill James:

Yeah, go ahead, Christy.

Kristi McClure:

I've got one for you all. Okay. So this was one that was submitted before that I wanted to throw out there for you all. One of our plants is using earbuds under their hearing protection and they say they are OSHA approved. However, the person who asked this is very smart because they know that OSHA does not endorse products. So how should this person proceed?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Do you want me to take this one?

Jill James:

Yeah, go ahead, Todd.

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Okay. I can search this up right now, but NIOSH has a fantastic step-by-step thing on their website for hearing conservation programs. They will walk you through how to create a plan to do noise level monitoring. They'll talk about how to set up your sound level meters or how to set up your noise dosimeters. They'll help you interpret the data. They will then go through and you'll explore engineering controls, you'll explore administrative controls and then they'll actually ... The final one is PPE and how to select the proper NRR noise reduction rating for the PPE that you provide so that they are protected because work-related noise loss or hearing loss is 100% preventable. How does that sound?

Jill James:

That sounds good. I'll add to that just to reiterate in case someone listening is like, "Wait, what? OSHA doesn't improve anything?" No, they don't approve anything. Yet when you are a consumer, when you're an EHS professional, you may see all kinds of things when you're trying to buy things that say OSHA approved this and OSHA approved that. It's an OSHA approved ladder, OSHA approved table saw, all of that business. OSHA approved training, that doesn't exist. OSHA doesn't have an approval body. They just don't do that. The only time OSHA gets a smidge close to that is with the content that must be covered for the OSHA 10 and 30 hour training where they dictate you have to spend this many minutes on this kind of topic and this kind of topic and you need to go over these kind of things, but they don't approve anything. They don't approve anything. And so they're not going to approve your earbuds or your hearing protection, but ANSI is going to give them ratings after you know what level of protection you need so that you can buy the right ones and ANSI is not going to give a rating to earbuds. We know that. Okay. What other questions? Todd, can you maybe read one of the ... Do we want to talk about the ... Yeah, go ahead, Christie.

Kristi McClure:

Well, actually there was ... So follow up, do you have similar recommendations for PPE? So like NIOSH's Development of Hearing Protection Program, what about extending to other PPE?

Jill James:

Yeah. So things like respirators, things like steel toe boots, hard hats, that kind of thing. ANSI will be a good source of proof for you for that as well. But again, you have to pay for those. So NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health will be able to be the agency that can give you some really great guidance on that as well. Of course, you can go to the OSHA website as well. Todd, do you want to talk about any other resources for people with ... How do you determine types of PPE?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Well, who's your vendor?

Jill James:

I

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Was just going to say SNL, Cintas, or a local one. I like local ones because you tend to get really good service. Talk to them. A lot of them will provide you with the actual JHA that has to be performed before you select the PPE because it supports the conditions of it. And usually there's an ANSI or an ASTM rating that needs to be there to protect the workers. They should be able to provide you with samples so the workers can actually take it out onto the job, try it out, let you know if their hands, do they get too wet? Do the gloves destroy something? Do they lose tactile sensitivity? That's the way you want to do it. Yeah, there's a combination of OSHA and ANSI. I'm trying to find something right now for the PPE from NIOSH, PristProtect Equipment and CDC.

Jill James:

Yeah. Just to talk about vendors, my favorite vendors to work with with PPE have been for fall protection. Some of them are so brilliant with the trainers that they have. If you have a great vendor who has employed subject matter experts ask that, who's your SME? They might be some of your best sources. I wanted to tackle this question that someone's asking about what happens, what does it exactly mean when a vendor sells a course that is OSHA approved? I'm assuming they mean a safety training like an online course. All right Again, OSHA doesn't approve anything.What I can say from the perspective of HSI because we get this question quite often and we do sell content is that our content development team creates training that is in compliance with the OSHA regulation. So in compliance with does not mean OSHA approved because again, OSHA doesn't approve anything, but you want to make sure when you are buying content that it meets the letter of the law at a minimum. And the training that HSI creates does do that. It does meet the letter of the law, but then it often goes further than that incorporating things from examples we've been giving as we've been going along like ANSI, that kind of thing. All right, question. Any other questions we want to read out loud here?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Yeah, Jill. Jill, can you remind me again where I can find the program that helps you identify what training my employer's required to provide in general industry? We are a staffing agency. I know that we provide the general, but I just wanted to make sure. You and Christie had put that thing together.

Jill James:

Oh, sure. So many years ago, Christie, who's with us here today, Christie and I created something called the OSHA Safety Training Assessment Tool. It's available on the HSI website. We read every single one, 1910, 1926, the maritime, the agriculture regulations and we sifted for every time a regulation said must or shall educate, train. And then we created an assessment tool based on that and you can take the assessment, answer the questions yes or no. The final report gives you the citation for which regulation says you have to do this kind of training and then the frequency with which it has to be done if the regulation says that. So I'm guessing Christie might be sharing that in the chat and/or she's probably going to navigate to it right now. It'll be on the landing page that we've created for you.

Kristi McClure:

Yes. Yeah. So we will send you this information, everyone who is on the webinar. It's a fantastic tool that can help you really tease out what's needed for your specific work environment.

Jill James:

Let's see. Todd, another question. What are you seeing that you want to read out loud?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Is wearing one earbud good for safety practice? No. What about the other ear? I got tinnitus in this ear, but this ear's fine. No, you have to perform a survey, an assessment to find out what people are being exposed to in their work shift. And then based on that, it's better to try to control the noise at the source, whether you are isolating it or absorbing it or through preventative maintenance, reducing vibration and noise. If you can't do that, then you have to assess what sort of hearing protection affords them the noise reduction, but then also doesn't get in the way of the work they're doing. So is wearing one earbud good for ... No, it's not. I hope they're being facetious.

Jill James:

Yeah. There's another question in here about in our experience as inspectors, is it common to find vendors that did not provide OSHA compliant training that didn't meet the mandates or the requirements? Yeah, I mean, that was a big part of our job, whether it was training that was created by the employer or by the HS professional themselves, that was our job was to look through your policies, procedures. And we asked, "Did you train the employee?" And then someone would show us the proof of training. Then our next question was, "What did you train them on and can I see what you did?" So whether that was something, if that was information that you got from an online provider or whether that was something a PowerPoint or whatever it is that you had, we would assess those things. And yes, we often found deficiencies in them. So again, if you're creating training yourself or if you're buying it from somewhere else, you want to know if that training is compliant with the OSHA regulations and if you're buying it from someone else, who are the subject matter experts, were subject matter experts used in the creation of that training. Todd, I can see that you're typing. What other questions do we have here that we

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Talk about? There's a question regarding how to let go of an employee that does not meet expectations after training that work with HR.That's what I was just typing. HR needs to have a policy of how they approach that, how it's measured. If you just randomly say, "Oh, you're let go. " Well, then I guess if you're in a right to work state, you could get away with that, but in non-right to work states, you got to be able to document that stuff. Talk to the legal counsel you have access to and HR should be handling that.

Kristi McClure:

Christine- We had someone submit a question that their business model changed and that they added a laboratory and would that change their safety profile?

Jill James:

It would change if you've never had a laboratory in your company in the past, then learning about the laboratory safety rules would definitely be ... You have new hazards, you're introducing new hazards. Todd, do you want to run through some of the new hazards associated with labs?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Well, you're going to have chemistry. So it's like hazardous chemicals. Are they somehow covered in OSHA? Are they covered in any EPA stuff? Do you have biologicals? That's the thing, you have to do a complete assessment of what is there. And there's also an OSHA laboratory standard, isn't it, like 1450 or something like that?

Jill James:

Yeah, there is an OSHA laboratory standard and there might be equipment and tools that you've never been exposed to before, like biological safety cabinets and there's many different styles and whether they have filters or whether they're exhausting out a building and what are they made for and how do they operate? Again, vendors can be really helpful with those kind of things. Centrifuges, maybe you've never had one before, special personal protective equipment, maybe you're working with some biological agents that are kind of scary and what do you need to know about that? So it's doing a deep dive in figuring out what are these hazards and how do I protect my employees from them. Christie, do we have time for another question or do we want to share what's coming up next and resources for you?

Kristi McClure:

I was going to share what's coming up next. Perfect. And as I was listening to you about labs, it seemed to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that that is true for other hazards and other may have new equipment, a new just department facility, that all those things you said is applicable to more than just a lab.

Jill James:

That's right. Anytime things change.

Kristi McClure:

Well, and we had a couple of questions, one asking about is AI going to replace safety professionals? How do you prepare best practices for anticipating an OSHA survey? And so we wanted to let you know that we do have plans for safety unscripted part three and also addressing some of the technology changes and how do we in the safety EHS profession keep up with those changes. So look for emails for that coming. A lot of questions and obviously as Jill and Todd spoke earlier related to feeling like an imposter and in March we'll be having a webinar covering do you feel like a safety imposter and how to grow your expertise. So if you haven't had enough of Jill and Todd, there's more coming in the future on that one. We will be sending this to you with some upcoming events and various activities we'll be having that will be of interest. And then as I said earlier, we do have plans to email everyone here, everyone who registered with a link to the webinar recording. In addition, we have a webpage with a variety of different resources and information, things that came up today in the webinar, links as well as related topics that can help you out and the recording of part one. So look for that email from HSI and if you would like to share with colleagues or others in the field, feel free to forward that on. And I want to be respectful, all three of us want to be respectful of your time as we're getting towards the end. Any closing comments or thoughts, Jill and Todd, as we're wrapping this up for everybody?

Jill James:

Hey, I just want to say thanks to everyone who shows up at these and for asking us such good questions. It's professional fun for Todd and I to be in the hot seat and we really appreciate the thoughtfulness that you bring here to all of the questions that you ask and we look forward to coming back again and again. Todd, how about you?

Dr. Todd Loushine:

Yeah, I enjoy it too. Thank you everybody. Would someone please make a recommendation that maybe this could be like a new job for me where I can just sit here and you guys can text me or call me and I can just try to help you out because I get a lot of pleasure out of this and hearing you're quite reading your questions actually informs me when I go and teach my classes on campus too. So I'll be like, "Hey, oh, this person asked this question the other day," and then I talk more about it and teach my students how to find answers. So double thank you all. This was great carsis for me. Also, it gives me things to talk about in my lectures.

Jill James:

Wonderful. Thank you all so much.

Kristi McClure:

Have a wonderful rest of the week and thank you everybody for doing this important work. We appreciate you and we will see you next time. Take care.

Jill James:

Thank you for your time listening today and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. May your employees and those we influence know that our profession cares deeply about human wellbeing, which is the core of our practice. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in any podcast player or you can find us and read the transcript and listen at hsi.com. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more EHS professionals like Dr. Loushine and I. Special thanks to Emily Gould, our podcast producer and until next time, thanks for listening.