141: Safety Unscripted Pt. 3: Your Questions, Expert Answers

Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode is recorded June 25th, 2026. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. Three times this year, my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Todd Loushine, who's associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and I hosted webinars where any EHS professional could ask us anything. Anything that is about EHS 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 bit intimidating. So if you've ever wished there was some kind of hotline where you could pick up a phone and an EHS professional would be on standby to answer your questions, well, here it is. Enjoy this episode pulled from the third webinar recording of Safety Unscripted, or as Todd and I call it, ask us anything. Enjoy. Hello everyone. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. My name is Jill James. I'm Chief Safety Officer with HSI and I am in Minnesota, so hello in case anyone out there is also from Minnesota and to my east is my friend, Dr. Todd Loushine. Dr. Loushine is associate professor in the Department of Occupational. I never get this right, Todd.

Todd Loushine:

Department of- Occupational, environmental safety and health. Yeah.

Jill James:

Why is it so long at your university? The University of Wisconsin Whitewater. So Todd and I have been, we can joke with each other like this because we've been friends for literally 32 years. We started our careers at OSHA together in the state of Minnesota as investigators. Todd worked as an industrial hygienist. I worked in safety. We did inspections together. We were mentored by the same people and as we left government service and went into the private sector and Todd eventually went into education, we keep finding our way back to one another every year in different ways to give back to the profession. And so this has been really fun, this webinar series, Safety Unscripted. I like to call it the Call-in Show where you can ask us anything. And so really happy that you're here today. Thank you. Over all of these webinars that we've done, you've submitted a lot of questions. Thank you very much. And what we did was we took the questions and we put them together thematically so we could answer them in groups. And you can see the checkboxes on the screen are the topic areas, the themes that we've answered in the previous two webinars and you'll get links to those today as well. So if you want to go back and listen to them, if you're here for the first time, you can do that. And the three themes that we're going to be talking about today are emergency preparedness, contractor and subcontractor, multi-employer safety, and then technology and AI. And we'll spend about the first 30 minutes on those subjects and then the last half of the webinar, you can put whatever you want in the chat and we'll try to answer as many as we can and you can submit your answers as we're going along today at any time. Questions rather. All right. Todd, first theme.

Todd Loushine:

Okay. So as soon as you guys started this in Wisconsin at noon on the first Wednesday of every month they run the siren. So as soon as you turned it on, I had a quick mute because it's super loud. Perfect. I can hear it. It works. All right. So let's go with the first question. How do you run your first fire drill? Well, I did some research on all this stuff, which is to say AI educated me or reminded me. For this one, what it says is your fire drill should not be something that is purely planned because then you're really not testing what it's supposed to be doing. It said it's more useful to set up a scenario, which I think is fantastic. Can you identify what in your plant or in your building could be a potential fire source? And then if that was to catch, run it that way. Maybe one of the exits would be incapacitated and so people have to be redirected or something. So that's the first thing. So how would you do it? First of all, you have the plan together, right? You've identified your exits, create a scenario and run it. They do say it's a good idea to coordinate with your local fire response. And so if they can be involved as well to make it even more real, that's a good way to do it. Jill, anything to add with that one?

Jill James:

Yeah. I wanted to talk about what you just keyed in on with the local fire department. And so if you go to your local fire chief in whatever size of city you live in or community and ask about doing a fire pre-plan with them, that's what it's called. And so a pre-plan is you meet with your local fire department, they come to your facility or facilities and they're going to help you be the eyes for what you're not noticing or seeing that will help you. How are we going to preplan getting things out? Do we see anything here that might be hazards that their trained eyes know but your eyes do not know? And they'll ask you questions like, "If we actually have an event here, what do we need to save for you? What are your highest value things outside the human beings, of course, that we would want to protect and where are those things located so we can draw them out on a map?" And then they're also going to want to ask you questions about what sort of hazardous substances, chemicals, materials that you have on site that they're going to need special firefighting agents for and they'll want your SDSs, your safety data sheets as well. So all of those things go into your emergency preparedness. And so it's called a fire pre-plan and I'd encourage you to do that with your local fire departments.

Todd Loushine:

Thank you. So with the next question during a fire drill, blah, blah, blah. So I just want to speak more broadly to this one and that is if you've got a massive building or campus and you've got workers that are not stationed in a specific spot all day and they move around, or maybe you even have the public coming in, if it's a public service like a government entity, you'd probably want to invest in some sort of technology that would allow you to track where people are. And there are different types of things out there where a person can just wear a badge and even though it has a fob to get into secured areas, it can also have the GPS to find out where they're located and whether they're even on site. Some places when you have a guest come in, they make you sign in with a fob and then you would be then tracked. If it's with a public entity, you're going to have to assign floor managers in which they're going to have to sweep through and escort out any public people that are there visiting. But the best thing you do is use ... And then you also want to post instructions on what to do, how to exit, make it very clear, have people looking out for each other, but use technology. That's the best thing to do to track where people are to make sure that they're going to the proper muster point. There should be a person who's going to be meeting any emergency responders on site. There's going to be probably some designated workers that are going to stay on site. They need to be trained to protect themselves and when to recognize when maybe they have to evacuate, do it in an emergency.

Jill James:

Yeah. And have more than one gathering point as well. I mean, more than one gathering point, depending on how people exit a building. And also if you have a chemical release and the wind is a particular direction, you can't always have people gathering in the same place. So those are things that you have to keep in mind. The OSHA website itself is going to have a lot of tips on the things that Todd and I are sharing with you under emergency preparedness and planning. Under the crisis management plan, I didn't know if you wanted to talk about that one, Todd, but the thing I'm thinking about crisis management, I'm making an assumption that you're talking about maybe active shooter, active assailant, some kind of violence that's coming to your workplace and then what is your plan for that kind of thing. State of California has a lot of resources on their state OSHA plan and they have a law on this that kind of walks you through some of the elements you should have. Todd and I are big proponents and fans of going to a law first that already exists and the people that promulgate the laws have thought about a lot of these things. So I'd start with a law first and then fill in things as you go along. Anything else you want to talk about with that, Todd?

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. You need to create an incident command system. It should be just under the guise of the emergency planning. And I guess FEMA, if they're still funded enough, they have online training services, you can get certificates in order to train yourself if you're going to be the inside commander or who else is going to do it and help you create a program. And so that's where I would start.

Jill James:

Yeah. The question on there of cleaning up and disposing of chemical spills, the correct process, that really depends on what the chemical is and what cleaning agents you would use and who you would involve. If it's something that's a threat to the environment, that's going to be a different process than something that's in your actual facility. That really depends. So again, you'd want to get the correct agencies working with you and that might be the pollution control agency or the state equivalent or the county equivalent where you are. And then of course I would talk with the manufacturers of the chemicals you have and look at those SDSs because they're going to give you all the tips on how to clean up as well.

Todd Loushine:

So as far as lighting, OSHA doesn't require a certain foot candle, but you basically have to prove that people can see the steps in front of them or see their pathway. And you may have to put in emergency lighting to supplement if it could be dark or if power may go out if they need to evacuate. Next thing is somebody had asked, how many exits do you need? If you go to the OSHA standard itself, and I believe it's like 1910, 38 or 39, it's not clear. It says you have to have as many as you need. But if you go into the life safety code, which is NFPA 101, they do call it out and you might say, "Well, but then I have to pay for it. " Not if you have AI, AI is now able to crack into it. And here's what NFPA 101 part 7.4.1.2. One exit is for less than 50 employees, 50 to 500, two exits, over 503 exits, over 1,004 exits. And so you can dig into these things and find these answers. We were just talking about this before is how is ANSI and these other consensus standard organizations going to still have people pay for things when AI is digging in and trying to get it ... Oh, don't tell people how to break rules. Sorry, don't break rules. We're doing it for educational purposes and not for selling things.

Jill James:

So if what Todd was just talking about went over your head for just a second. So The OSHA regulations, there's no cost to get them, right? We can all go to a website and get them, but there are these things called consensus regulations and they are often for a cost. And so the National Fire Protection Agency, you have to pay to have access to them. The American National Standard Institute, you have to pay to have access to them. And those consensus regulations are like the backbone of most of the OSHA regulations. When OSHA started to promulgate regulations back in 1970, they had to go somewhere to figure out what were they going to put in the books. And so they went to these consensus building organizations, which you have to pay to be able to see and read them. So Todd was giving you a little bit of a shortcut, but I don't know that we can completely rely on that.

Todd Loushine:

Let me relay it. So I had purchased NFPA 101 and I was reading out of my own script. How does that sound?

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. What else do we want to cover before we move on?

Todd Loushine:

Let's move on to the next one.

Jill James:

All right. Okay. Yeah, this one, contractor, subcontractor. So the broad brush stroke that I want to talk about here and share with all of you on these questions about who's responsible for what when there's subcontractors, contractors, what we would call multi-employer work sites. So the OSHA regulations themselves has a policy called the multi-employer work site policy and we'll share that with you and where to find that on the website. And that is a policy that OSHA regulators, investigators like Todd and I had to follow. And so whenever we were responding to a multi-employer work site, then we had to answer several questions before we decided who were we going to cite when we found a hazard. And so they have, I guess, four different criteria that you have to show. So one is called the creating employer. Who created the hazard? If that employer created the hazard, that employer would get a citation under the eyes of OSHA. Who is the exposing employer, meaning whose employees were exposed to that hazard? So it might be employer A created the hazard and employer A, B, and C had employees who are exposed to that hazard. So it could be many subcontractors. And then who is the correcting employer? Meaning who has the ability to correct that particular hazard? It might be the person or the company that created it, it might not. And then the last one is called controlling employer. So who has overall control of the workplace setting? So that control might mean sets the schedule, expects people to show up at a certain time, including the contractors and subcontractors, maybe even provide some tools and equipment that are considered the controlling employer. So when Todd and I would identify a hazard and there were many employers on the same work site, then we would go through who created, who exposed, who corrected, and who controls. And that's like the theme for nearly all of the questions that are on this screen. Christie, could you share the policy on screen just so people can see where that is if you ... Yeah. So Christie's going to the multi-employer work site policy. It's a directive that investigators are mandated to follow and you can all read this for yourselves and it'll give you some really great details on the four things that I just talked about, creating, exposing, correcting and controlling. I hope that helps. Todd, anything else on this screen that we want to address? I can see one thing that I want to talk about, but I want to give you a minute.

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. So there was the DOT question regarding marijuana and I did look that up and yeah, you can't have any THC in your blood at all. Even if it's a CBL product, you shouldn't chance it. A positive test is a positive test and you lose your license. And that I believe a more stricter law was signed into law at the end of 2025 and that's under I think the head of transportation, Sean something. He was on road rules on MTV. He's married to the woman. Yes,

Jill James:

Yes, yes. I remember who-

Todd Loushine:

Sean Duffy. Sean Duffy. Go ahead, Joe. Go ahead.

Jill James:

Yeah. So the question about what's the right way to intervene when a subcontractor violates a safety violation, it's really what I just talked about. It's really what I just talked about. So the right way is the way that's going to protect you. And so if you are the controlling employer, you need to step in because you're going to end up holding onto that. And when I talked about multi-employer work site policy, it means that many employers can be cited for the same thing if they meet that criteria of creating, exposing, correcting, and controlling. You don't have to meet all four, but if you meet any of them, then you can be cited by OSHA. Question on there is, if a member of the public is injured, does OSHA apply? No, it does not. OSHA laws only apply to employer employee relationships. So even if you have one employee, you're covered by the OSHA laws, but the general public is not covered by the OSHA laws. That would go to your liability insurance as an example. Anything else we want to talk about here before we move on, Todd? And I hope you all are finding this helpful. I think we covered most of this with multi-employer work site.

Todd Loushine:

I agree. Yeah.

Jill James:

Okay. All right. Let's move on to AI. Wow. All right. So you all had a lot of questions on this. Todd, do you want to just take the first one and then I can step in on some of the AI stuff?

Todd Loushine:

Yeah, sure. So AI is a tool, everybody. It's not something that is going to replace you because it does what you tell it to do. Now, if it was given all the sensory to do visual things and talk to people and have the emotional intelligence to be able to communicate and get people to report things, then maybe. But I think that's pretty far off right now. So as far as using SharePoint, that's another tool. If you want to build something on your own, go ahead and do it. But there are plenty of dashboard systems that are already built and aligned with the ANCZ10 that you could purchase off the shelf and they would help you implement it. So depending on your time and what your budget is, you got to decide which one is best for you. But advice for using SharePoint again, personally, I don't have the time. That's a lot to invest in something like that

Jill James:

When there's other tools that exist for that purpose.

Todd Loushine:

Exactly. That probably can lead to more time savings and cost savings in the future. So you got to weigh out what you have the capability of doing and how much money you have.

Jill James:

And as far as AI goes, it's here, right? It's here and we can't dig our heels in and say we're not going to engage with it. We really need to learn about it as EHS professionals and we have to be careful and we have to educate ourselves. What I'm seeing professionally is that we don't have a lot of literacy as a profession around the use of AI right now. You talk to many people in our industry and it's like, "Oh, I'm using it for this. Oh, I'm using it for that. Oh, I'm using it for that. " And it's like, oh, are we introducing any new hazards? We really kind of have to be careful with the way that we're using things. So for example, with literacy, some of us may feel that an AI help agent like Todd was talking about with Claude or ChatGPT is what AI is, except it's more than that. It's more than that and it can be embedded into software that we're using and that's been around for a really long time. So figuring out what our literacy is and what it really is and what it can do and where it exists is really important for us. In terms of AI literacy, there is a partnership that just happened recently between the American Society of Safety Professionals and the University of Alabama at Birmingham and they have come up ... Yeah, Christie, are you showing it? Yeah, you're showing it to us now. Thank you. This is a new news release from ASSP. Todd is on the board of ASSP and they have come together to create a certificate for EHS professionals on AI. So that can help with your literacy. And they have a cohort of, it's a course that starts and I believe it's free or there's a really low barrier to entry with a cost and they have a cohort that's starting, I think it's June 22nd and we'll share this link with you as well. And then there's another cohort of training you can take that's I think in August. There's a couple different dates. Christie's highlighting it for you now. So to improve your literacy, I would say absolutely think about taking a course like that. And then in terms of the beware things. So if you are using AI, Claude or any other named AI and you're putting proprietary data in it from your company or personal data from your employees, be really careful with that. Be really careful with that. You're training the AI and you're putting all of the private information into the wider world. Now you can, employers can purchase AI tools that have gates around it so your stuff stays yours, but if you're just using anything on the open market and you're using it for work, I'd be really, really careful about that. And then there are AI tools that are being created through EHS software companies like HSI to do things that are really cool that can help you with your job. So things like helping you develop learning paths based on the job titles of your employees or a hazard recognition software that is looking at pictures or videos and identifying hazards that then the human in the middle can say, "Yes, that is a hazard or no, that isn't a hazard." There are corrective action recommendations like you entered an incident that happened or a near miss that happened and then the AI behind the scenes is recommending recommendations for you. There's also document creations and summaries. So for example, maybe an employee is entering information about an incident that happened and they've written a whole long thing or maybe a short thing and the AI is asking for more information because there's missing parts and pieces. We've all gotten incident reports before that were really light on facts and then we've gotten some that were really dense and AI can help summarize those things. Those are some of the ways that AI is being used to help our profession. And I really appreciate and like that because I think about it as being a way to scale our jobs so that more people can get involved, not just EHS professionals like entering incident things or taking a photo of something and asking like, "Is this a hazard or do you see any hazards in here?" That then you as the professional can review the findings instead of having to physically go out to every facility that you have. So I look at that as many hands make lighter work, but it's so critically important to have a human in the middle. I guess another thing from a buyer beware standpoint, when you're using tools for tools within AI, you really want to know where is the source of this information coming from? Is it from the wider web? Is it just from sourced data that we know the sourcing of? So when you're meeting with a software company, for example, you're going to want to ask them, "Where's this information coming from? What is the source document?" Ask those kind of questions. The podcast that I host that some of you know about called the Accidental Safety Pro. I had our chief technology officer, our CEO of our company and our vice president of product. They're the ones who are creating AI solutions with their teams right now in our company. And I really wanted to ask them, how is the sausage made behind the scenes in your professions and your engineering and what are you doing to do it so it doesn't put our profession at risk? And so that podcast covers those kind of things and will help you as you're using the tools, as Todd said, that are now at our disposal. What do we need to know? What do we need to be careful about? And then Todd, anything else you want to say about the importance of human beings in this?

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. So I kind of want to take us a little bit different way and that is one thing that I'm learning to use this in education and it's really confounding right now because a lot of professors are either anxious about it or trying to deny its use. And so one of the first things I'm trying to teach students how to use it ethically, that when you're going to produce a report, if you're going to do an assessment, whatever it is, on the front page you should clearly indicate what you contributed to it and what AI contributed to it. Sometimes it's just the reshuffling and making sure it's in a good deliverable status. Well, then just say that. And you can actually, once it's delivered your final product, whether it's a PowerPoint or a Word document or PDF, whatever, you can actually ask it to help you write a really good disclaimer statement. So make sure you're clearly indicating what you're using it for. I wish everything that was generated as far as visuals and videos, maybe even sound stuff always required that to be in there, but right now we're kind of self-policing with it. The other is that make sure you don't just generate it and be like, "We're done." You got to read through it. I used it to generate a PowerPoint for a conference I presented in last week in Florida and I went through 10 iterations that I would produce it. I'm like, "Okay, so let's go this way with it. " But in addition to that, when I've used it in classes to evaluate student performance, what I was basically doing is I was actually allowing it to review what students were doing based on how I instructed the assignment and how I would use a rubric, but then I had it teach me what can I do to make a more concise rubric that would score more fairly based on I kind of picked my favorite submission and then I picked another one that had clear things that were lacking. Then I asked it to create some lessons, some lectures and maybe even some minor assignments that would let me ramp up so the students were better prepared to submit that big assignment. So how does that help all of you that if you're going to use it to evaluate, and I think somebody said on here like an emergency evacuation plan or emergency preparedness, well, you have a lot of work to do. You can't just allow it just to come out of thin air with it. Do your own risk profile. Identify what is currently being used and what the discrepancies may be and then work with it to help sort of synthesize something that's a litle bit more advanced. But believe me, that's step one. You may have to go through five steps, 10 steps in order to make it a usable document. One thing I would say is, and I've been this in places where they've got the map, here you are, this is how you exit, I really feel that map should be oriented. So when you look at it, the area around you is oriented. So as you're facing it, if it says I need to go to the right, it's my actual right. And so that's something that AI can do to help you out. It may help you with updating it annually. This is what we did last year. Any updates on the numbers they call or who are the contacts that should call. Every drill should be something that you enter into it to improve what sort of metrics you're using as far as what are the effectiveness of your drill or response. So use it as a tool and not something that is going to try and take things over because it's not what it's for. And even if you ask it, "Can you take everything over?" It should admit to you, "No, I will not take it over. You're the subject matter expert. I'm just here to assist you. "

Jill James:

Right. Let's just reiterate that the subject matter expert, which is you or depending on the topic in your organization or maybe a professional you reach out to is critically important. So getting to that last bullet on the slide, can it replace the safety position? Good luck. No, we still need a subject matter expert to review things to be that person in the middle. So I would not worry about that. We still need the people. I was at a conference last week with the National Institute of Environment Mental health sciences and the entire conference was about AI. And some of the presenters at the conference were using our hierarchy of controls if you've been a practitioner for a long time, you know what I'm talking about. And they applied the hierarchy of controls to using AI. And so how would we view an AI tool, any AI tool that we're looking at and use the hierarchy of controls to determine whether or not it was a hazard, the tool that we were using. It's really, really fascinating. Love that. So this is an emerging field for us. It's exciting. There are things that can be really helpful and there are things that we need to be careful about and really work on our literacy and keep working on it because this is only going to keep changing, but it's here and probably here to stay. Okay. Shall we move on? All right. So we had some questions that were submitted in advance of this and maybe we can take a few of these, Todd, and then see what we can answer that people are submitting right now and have submitted as well.

Todd Loushine:

Okay. I can go with the first one.

Jill James:

Okay.

Todd Loushine:

So supervisors not wearing PPE. Does your company have a blanket policy that everyone who enters a certain space or area must have certain types of PPE? Well, that means anybody who walks by. And if supervisors aren't doing it, then who is supposed to hold those supervisors accountable for their behavior and the work they do? Probably either a middle manager or plant manager or something like that. Well, they need to be brought on board to enforce these things. And if they don't, well then it's going to make it almost impossible to enforce the workers who are out on the floor. And so they need to understand that there's a consistency there, that inconsistency causes confusion. It seems unfair and it just won't work. So there has to be an agreement here. Either everybody's going to wear it or only certain people have to and that needs to be communicated. That's the way it is. And there needs to be maybe some form of, I don't want to use the term punishment, but documentation that there is a response if you violate these expectations.

Jill James:

Yeah. And Christie is prompting you and I that the questions that are here are things that we've answered in the previous two. Ask us anything additions. And so those are in the recording that you'll have access to at the end of this in the landing page that we have where you can see all the answers to these questions that we've had in the past. All right. So with that, let's see what you're all asking today.

Todd Loushine:

So I've answered all the questions that have been put on the questions.

Jill James:

Okay. Let's look at some of the other ones that ... Thanks, Todd. Todd has the fastest fingers and can speak and apparently look things up and type at the same time. This is why we are a good team. All right. Let's see. Someone had asked, can you access scaffolding from an extension ladder through the guardrail to your working platform without removing a midrail? No, because that would require the employee to climb over or under the midrail and that's not acceptable. You have to have an actual pass through with something for the employee to hold onto as they're accessing the platform for the scaffold. Do you want to take one?

Todd Loushine:

No, no, keep going. Keep going. I'm kind of reviewing things. Sorry.

Jill James:

Okay. Review and then decide which ones you want to read out loud as well. Okay. So let's see. How to re-energize a good catch reporting program. Okay. So good catch reporting program, I'm making an assumption that that means that when you see someone doing something well like wearing the respirator properly or using three points of contact on a ladder, how can you re-energize a program like that? Well, you can use incentives, of course. That's okay to use because that wouldn't be punitive in this case, but really more importantly is the follow through. You're collecting the data on this, you're following through, you're giving people praise, you're reporting back on where we're seeing these things that are occurring correctly and maybe areas where there's still room for improvement, working on it that way. All right. Let's see. What else, Todd? Do you want to take one?

Todd Loushine:

Sure. How do I update my current safety program? I'm new to safety. Where do you begin? I think there's a bigger question here. You probably need to start taking some classes or going to some meetings so you can start learning. But if you're new to safety and it's like, well, where do I begin? I mean, if you want something to begin, I think that Jill and Christie had put together an assessment of what OSHA requires for training.

Jill James:

Yeah, there's two things I'm thinking of. We have a tool called the OSHA Safety Training Assessment. It's a tool that Christie and I created a few years ago where we read every single OSHA regulation that exists and found all of them that require training. And the tool that we created, which we can share with you all, asks you a set of simple questions that you place your mind in your type of employment setting and you answer the series of questions. The report will tell you which regulations say you must do training. It'll cite the regulation for you. And then if the regulation says how frequently you have to have that training done to do that. We also have a white paper on the ... Oh, Christie, I'm trying to remember the name of our white paperwork goes through the essential elements of workplace health and safety. So it starts with things like administrative must haves, like having the posters on the wall, having SDSs, those kinds of things. And then what about training? What about written programs? What about how are we going to identify hazards? All of those things are the minimum things that you have to do. So when you're thinking about where do I start, it would be in that area and we have a white paper on that. Todd, how about another one? Let's look at what else is coming

Todd Loushine:

In. And I'm going to speak a little bit more to that one. Sure. There is a small business handbook that may help you that provide ... It's quite extensive, provides a checklist, maybe that'll help you. But honestly, you need to review what the risk sources are. We call it the risk profile. Walkthroughs, talking to workers, you have a program. Why do you have a respiratory protection program? Just because it came out of nowhere or did you actually do personal air monitoring to find out what they're exposed to and then respiratory protection is the protective factor that you've decided to use or the mitigation factor you decided to use. So understand why the elements are there because sometimes when people do it, they do it more off of considering logical and not actually have evidence that this is an issue and that you fully assess. You need to document all your JHAs and JSAs, job hazard analysis, job safety analysis. I apologize. What was assessed, how you assessed it, what the results are. And then that should be reviewed on a periodic basis or when conditions in the workplace change.

Jill James:

Right. Someone's asking what makes a good safety policy and how often are they required to be reviewed? So good question. So within the OSHA laws, many of them have their own requirements on something that has to be in writing. They might call it a program, a policy, a standard operating procedure, an assessment, and those are by topic. So personal protective equipment has one, hearing conservation has one, respiratory protection has one. And then within that law, it talks about how often it has to be reviewed. Most of the time that has to do with when something is different or has changed, though some of those laws will say must be updated annually. But if you use the rule of thumb, like, is anything different? Did we change process, procedure, anything like that would go along with that. Let's see. I'll see if I can take one more, Todd. I'm looking at our list here. Some I know that you're going to want to talk about regarding health and safety audits advice on what further certifications or sessions can be found to further my education. In addition, can AI be a great tool to support safety audits? It can be. So I'll take this backwards. So can AI be a great support tool for safety audits? I mentioned when I was speaking earlier about a product that HSI has on hazard recognition where you submit a photo and it identifies hazards in it. And then the person who's the professional like yourself would verify, yes, that is a hazard. So that would be something that you could do. Again, you'd really want to ask, how was that created? What guardrails were used to create that kind of thing? And then how can you improve your hazard recognition skills? Well, you can do that through your own personal training, of course. I've got a whole series of videos called the Supervisor Safety Tip videos. They're free on HSI's website and it was created for that purpose to help you skill up your hazard recognition skills. Todd, other ideas you have for people on hazard recognition that just came with our careers in OSHA. Gosh, when you get to do over 500 inspections, your eyes get to learn about a lot of hazards, but if they don't have that opportunity, what other education opportunities would you say?

Todd Loushine:

I would probably lean into networking and meeting with others in your area, similar industry. You can look at your injury records to find out where people are getting hurt that might help guide you a little bit. But this is very much a school of hard knocks skillset. You kind of pick it up as you go, you read about things, you learn about things, you learn from others. I don't know of any program that brings up a picture like a Roshack interpretation ink blot, whereas the hazard, it's something we picked up over a career of just doing things and learning things every day.

Jill James:

OSHA.gov on their website, they have some areas on spotting hazards in the e-tools section. If you go to the OSHA website and click on the A to Z index, oh, Christie's doing it for us now. I think if we click on E, we might find Etools in there. Yeah. And then there's going to be some guidance for you in that particular area of the website. I think this question, I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here, but I'm going to take a crack at it. When do office plants become a safety hazard? What's the line there? So I'm assuming you mean plants as in green plants like a potted plant. When do they become a hazard? So I'm just imagining you may have a colleague or two that might have a bazillion plants on a windowsill or something and it kind of looks like a little mini jungle in the workplace. That's something that you'd want to set a policy on. So are they a actual physical hazard where they can fall and hurt people? Are they obstructing exits, that kind of thing? Are they poisonous I guess would be and poisonous to human beings assuming you don't allow pets or something in your work environment. So what's the line there? The answer is there isn't a standard on it unless it's like obstructing an exit, creating some sort of known hazard, you get to decide what that is. Todd, do you want to take some others that we're seeing rolling in?

Todd Loushine:

Well, I just want to follow up on that one because now what we're doing, that question to me kind of goes on the lines of indoor air quality. Indoor quality, there aren't really specific standards other than certain air contaminants, but this would probably be like an odorous thing or maybe the plant is like giving off a-

Jill James:

Mold in the dirt of the pot?

Todd Loushine:

Yes. Mold in the dirt of the plant or the flowers are giving off spores or what causes allergies? Allergens. Allergens. Exactly. Yeah. So it's not specifically a safety issue unless they grow tall enough that they're within 12 inches of say a sprinkler head or something like that. I mean, you just got to be reasonable here that is, is it going to cause people to be tripped up? Is it causing people to sneeze too much or runny nose or scratchy eyes? It's more of a case by case basis. Okay, go ahead.

Jill James:

Yeah. Gosh, I love this question and we could probably have coffee over this question. In your own opinion and experience, do you consider job switching necessary to grow within the EHS field? Is there such a thing as staying at a on place too long? Man, I mean, I think there's a case for both, right? If you're at on place and you have opportunities to keep growing in the profession, like maybe you're working for the administrative arm of a company that has many different entities. I had the opportunity to, when I worked in the poultry industry where they had an engineering firm and a firm that was developing vaccines for animals and barns and a slaughterhouse and transportation and a feed mill. I learned so much at that job because I had the opportunity to see so many different things. I really, really loved that. I can see where maybe if you're someone who likes to learn and you want to keep growing and you're a curious person that maybe changing jobs would be healthy for your career. What say you, Todd?

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. I mean, I think no matter where you are in your career, it's good to learn to monitor the job boards. I monitor them a lot because a lot of people ask me to repost jobs, especially ones that would be dedicated to my students. If you're not happy, you should probably move on. That's what it really comes down to. If this is a certain job or career, and that's where mentors and that personal board of directors really comes into play. That's probably a decision you don't want to make on your own. You want some external advice.

Jill James:

About two years ago, remember, Todd, you and I did a session at some of the conferences we spoke at called, Should I Stay or Should I Go,

Todd Loushine:

Where

Jill James:

We really grappled with that topic for people. I don't remember if that's on our website or not. Christie might be able to find that one for us.

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. There's a lot of factors that go into it, but if it's a career advancement you want ... Right now, I'm watching my former students changing jobs. I mean, not each one, but I see them being promoted quite a bit. And any workplace, this is more of an HR issue. If they're not giving you the professional ability to expand and grow and pick up new things, that's on them. I think today it costs a hell of a lot more to try and recruit and hire new people that they should know they should be investing in your future and allowing you to grow.

Jill James:

Yeah. Todd, let's tackle this question and I think we have a two part in here as I'm reading it. So incentives would be a great idea, but they don't have long-term effect. Punitive measures are a double-edged sword. They set a bad tone among workers. Fire someone, send them home, then you don't have workers you need. So you know where I'm going here. So let's talk about incentives and then let's talk about what you and I have been doing at the last few conferences.

Todd Loushine:

Okay. So yeah, in order to gain sustainable behavioral change, intrinsic rewards tend to be more successful versus I'm going to pay you if you don't get hurt. Here's the thing though, and studies have shown this, that in a zero blame environment, you get only ... What it does is it allows for workers to not fear when they report things, but in addition to that, there is no, how are you going to hold people accountable, especially in high hazard industries? And so if everybody's going out of their way to be safe and wear the proper PPE and do the proper reporting and everything, but somebody keeps avoiding that and not following those rules, that's putting themselves and others in harm, there needs to be some sort of documentation and response to it. You owe it to the people who are doing the right thing day in and day out that there is some form of, you can use the term punishment or punitive measures. And as far as holding onto, I mean, what can we do to be a servant leader to ensure that people are not only getting the job done, but getting the job done safely? And if someone just 100% refuses, that's a liability now if you don't take care of it and move on. It goes for equipment too. And so it has to be a balance of the both and not one or the other.

Jill James:

So just to tie a bow on the incentive piece, OSHA does have opinions written on their website about incentives being a tool that can get people to under report hazards. So employers who are like, we're going to give everybody a pizza party or some company swag or whatever, if we don't have any injuries, then people are under reporting and OSHA is really against that as are we as professionals to Todd's point. The punitive things, having policies when people break your rules, first of all, you have to have rules and then you have to have a policy on what happens when you break a rule so that you can lean into that and apply it with equal measure when something happens. So what Todd and I have been doing this year, and if any of you who are listening here today are going to be at the American Society of Safety Professionals Conference in Anaheim coming up in a couple of weeks, we are presenting a topic called What Would Ethical Decision Making. And so we share with the audience models of ethical decision making and then talk about that. We unpack that a bit and then we bring scenarios to the audience like really hard thing A, what would you do? Why would you choose that and getting into that. So we have that as a recorded webinar as well if you're not going to be at ASSP that we'll be able to share with you. When you're asking that question, that's what I think about.

Todd Loushine:

Yes. Yeah. And Jill is referring to outcomes-based decision-making models and we have people try to get some reflective insight on what they tend to lean on for what guides their decision making. In addition to that, what's come out of this is that some safety policies may have equality, but what we learned is equity is better, that there are certain conditions, scenarios, stuff like that, that may go into your decision that may allow you some flexibility or adaptivity to your policies. To have a stark black and white do this, that happens. We found that that doesn't always provide the outcomes you want. So something to think about. Next question, what certifications do you recommend for safety professionals? Now, you look at the job postings of the type of position you want. Some employers and industries will have either you have a certain certification or you have the ability to obtain it. So I mean, we tend to see the CSP, the board of certified safety professionals, certified safety professional seems to be what a lot of places want. If you're going to be doing industrial hygiene work, you probably need the certified industrial hygienist or CIH, which is offered through the global accrediting group. But then there's construction certifications or designations you can pursue. I'm going to speak, this is personally. So Christie, you can put a disclaimer up if you want. I don't think that anything that you can take by going to a day or two day thing and they just pay the money, you take a multiple choice and then boom, they give you a certificate. Those aren't worth anything because then it's just verbatim regurgitation of what they just told you and it doesn't really establish anything. Something that actually requires you to sit down and take a proctored exam, whether it's computer proctored or personal proctor that you have to do continuous improvement, or I'm sorry, continuous education over a period of time to maintain that you have to practice based on a set of professional ethics standards, which is another topic we talked about, but not here, that's what you want. You want those types of certifications. But rule number one, look at job postings that you want to either do or have and they will indicate which certifications are required for it because that's really what it comes down to is that is ... Go ahead.

Jill James:

No, I was just going to say, so does Professor Loushine. I mean, this is your career and field. Yeah. Understood your answer. Yeah, absolutely.

Todd Loushine:

Yeah. I don't want to call some of those that are not worthy because I don't want to be putting anybody down. But again, rule of thumb. If you pay just a little bit of money and you take a little teeny quiz and they're like, "Boom, I've got this certification." Not worth it. Not worth

Jill James:

It. I mean, start that way and then keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Hey, Todd, under the stump the chump, let's see if we know this one. You might have to be fast with the Google. Are there any recent changes to the silica exposure compliance regulations? Did they drop the PELer and change it recently? Permissible exposure limit. So Todd's looking right now answer to that question. So silica for anyone who's listening and doesn't know what that is, silica sand, it's a component when you mix concrete. It's that really fine, fine stuff. Or maybe if you see someone doing tuck pointing between bricks or cutting concrete and there's that big white plume of dust around their head, that's silica and silica is a carcinogen. So are you finding anything if the permissible exposure limit's been dropped?

Todd Loushine:

It says OSHA regulations and their limitations. So something did change in 2025. OSHA requires respirators when silica levels exceed PEL. California requires respirators whether or not testing shows levels above the PEL. Oh,

Jill James:

Great. Okay. That's good.

Todd Loushine:

Workers exposed silica at or above the action level of 25 micrograms per meter cubed for 30 days of the year must offer medical screenings, chest X-rays and lung function tests. However, chest X-ray misses silicosis most of the time. You got to put together an air monitoring system.

Jill James:

Someone else is asking, does drywall sanding fall under table one? Does table one mean under silica? I'm not sure what table. If you can call us- That'd be

Todd Loushine:

Gypsum. Gypsum dust.

Jill James:

Gypsum dust? Okay. All right.

Todd Loushine:

Let me see. There

Jill James:

You go. I hope

Todd Loushine:

You guys- I'm trying to see gypsum dust. I hope you

Jill James:

Guys are enjoying this and know that we're not scripted here. We're literally reading your questions and trying to answer that.

Todd Loushine:

Okay. Gyms of dust is regulated by OSHA as a particulate, not otherwise regulated. So total dust is 15 milligrams, respirable is five milligrams per meter cubed, which 15 milligrams per meter cubed. I can't see my hand extended in front of my face. That's how thick

Jill James:

It is.

Todd Loushine:

That's good. Yeah.

Jill James:

Okay. That's good to know. Okay. Do you have any ideas on how to limit or reduce cell phone use on the job? Yeah, create a policy around it. I mean, literally, literally create a policy around it. There's an employer that I've known for a number of years that had so many employees with slip, trips, and falls because when they're walking between buildings, their heads were in their phones and they kept falling on things. So they had to create a policy that became enforceable, meaning if you broke the policy, just like if you showed up for work late or whatever, that policy would be put in place. So create a policy around that. Okay. What else, Todd, do we want to tackle here? It looks like we have five minutes left. Ooh, should we pass things back to Christie? Yeah,

Todd Loushine:

I

Jill James:

Think we should. Hey, everybody, thank you so much. Yes,

Todd Loushine:

Thank you.

Kristi McClure:

I was just noticing, I think related to the incentive program that somebody had commented that they like to walk the floor and talk to workers to understand why they do things and how. And also old timers, such as YouTube here today, are a wealth of information. So I think that's all this talk of technology and AI, again, human connection, understanding why we behave the way we do when you're struggling with adherence to safety rules and regulations is a great technique that is within our control.

Jill James:

Thank you for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. May our 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 iTunes, the Apple Podcast app or any other podcast player you'd like. Or if you prefer, you can 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.