Jill James:

This is The Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded March 24, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer. Today, my guest is Scott DeBow. Scott is a highly collaborative strategic thinker with 19 years of progressive leadership in the realm of risk and occupational safety. With an inside-out perspective as a safety professional in non-traditional employment settings, he sees tremendous opportunity for system improvements between joint employers to create safer working environments for contract and temporary workers. Working to align people, teams and industry resources for better safety within the joint employer community, he devotes much of his time developing safety leadership across organizations with a targeted emphasis on systems improvements as well as addressing the most critical type of risk far too easily overlooked, serious injuries and fatalities.

Until recently, Scott served as the practice leader for risk and safety at Randstad, a $23.3 billion global provider of HR services and the global leader in the HR services industry. He soon will be transitioning to a new role as the principal HSE advisor at Avetta, where he is excited to expand his contributions to employers around the globe who share the need to better manage safety and labor strategy among a shared workforce. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott DeBow:

Thank you so much, Jill. I'm excited to be here.

Jill James:

I'm excited to have you and actually honored that you're taking the time to do this because as the introduction indicated, you are between jobs. Like you just bookended one and you're starting another, right?

Scott DeBow:

Yes. Yes. Kind of like a, just a little space between, so -

Jill James:

Yeah. The liminal space.

Scott DeBow:

Right. Right.

Jill James:

Yeah, so for those of us who have gone from one job to the next, did you give yourself any break, or are you just going from one thing to the next?

Scott DeBow:

Well in a way it's going from one thing to the next. So I have a little bit of time to go outside, to go ride my bike, a little bit of downtime. Not as much as if life happened exactly the way I would always like to plan things. So as good things happen, opportunity and the pace of next opportunities present themselves. It wasn't a month like I might have preferred, but I had a little bit of time, which is nice, and I'm grateful for, certainly grateful for Randstad, for my previous employer. Amazing company, amazing leaders. Super understanding and supporting and helped make this transition possible. It's a logical next step for me in my career.

Jill James:

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of us can relate to that, and especially the pace with which you moved from A to B and what that looks like for everyone and the reasons why some of us make the transitions that we do. I know that ... I'm just thinking about your bookending one job and I think you're done with it now and then you and I were together on a panel conversation with the Verdantix organization earlier this week and now you're doing this and then you're jumping to the next thing and I was thinking, "Gosh, did I take a week between jobs ever once?" And I think I had that opportunity one time. But I think our audience can relate to kind of the intensity of what's happening in your life right now and I'm happy to hear that you're going to ride your bike, you're going to go outside, and you're going to do something for resiliency.

Scott DeBow:

Yes, absolutely. You got to take that time where you can find it, right?

Jill James:

That's right, that's right. Awesome. Well Scott, in the introduction I mentioned that you've been at this role of health and safety for 19 years and as you know the podcast is all about people sharing their stories and their path and journey and you've got 19 years and so where did it all start?

Scott DeBow:

Sure. So thank you again by the way for inviting me to be on your podcast. This is really a special thing, just to talk about how did we get in safety because at some point, others that hear our story just kind of connect with that and learn about our very noble profession and so thank you again for the invite to be here today.

So I think about where did my work career start was really the honest conversations my dad and I were having at the end of my high school career, and to be honest, I needed some structure. Going straight into college for me out of high school was ... Well there's a bit of a question mark. What kind of student would I be in college? I like to play, and my dad was honest enough to talk about it with me. So for me, my first work experience, real work experience, and I also say really my first education was the military. So I transitioned very quickly. I had a little more time between my last job and this job, going from high school to the military. I had a month or two over the summer but I went straight in as an enlisted person in the Navy, and went in at 18. Knew so little. What an experience, but for me, what I found was and what I learned quickly is look, this is an environment where there's obviously a lot of structure. Which is what I needed, and the important thing for me is application.

So in the military training, a lot of things you learn, you will quickly apply. So my education and training in the military wasn't so much in English or writing or traditional college courses, but it would be very specific to my initial what they call A school. After boot camp, you select a school, and mine was for corps school and in the Navy, your -

Jill James:

Yeah, what does that mean?

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, your corpsman rating is a bit of a jack of all trades. You learn so much about a little bit which is -

Jill James:

That describes our profession.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said, well said. So you're trained to do a little bit in immunizations, you learn a little bit about drawing blood and you learn to draw blood on each other, on your classmates, and that's always fun. And my first duty station, I went from medical operations and planning, did some stints through surgical wards, and then very quickly realized what I want to do is learn more about physical therapy. And so that's my next school, they call it a C school, and went to learn how to be a physical therapy at a technician level, so still enlisted at this point. But just fascinating, because I so appreciate the environment where look again, for me I had the structure, it was interesting, you would learn to apply things very quickly. So it was a great learning environment for me.

So that was my first introduction to kind of I think an educational environment and how I learn as an individual, I do well with structure and close accountability. Let's say that. So you could also say why I needed to learn that way had something to do with my maturity levels at the time. But for me, that's what was good.

Jill James:

Right, but I mean, I think even as full-grown adults as we are now, we can relate to that. I mean we all learn differently. We all consume, digest and apply information differently and yeah. I mean I know what my learning style is and I also know what my ... Like if I'm going to produce something, I know what my style is and it's maybe not a traditional one. Like I wait usually till the last minute for things.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah.

Jill James:

It's my style and I'm not changing it at this point because I somehow synthesize information when my back's against the wall a little bit faster. It's my style. That's not everybody's style for sure, but we learn these things about ourselves, right?

Scott DeBow:

Well said.

Jill James:

So you like structure, yeah.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. So I like structure. I'm also a processor. So your back's against the wall and you do well under pressure. What I like to do is I like to think about things. So I like to process things. I need time to do that. So I've learned to really appreciate working alongside other leaders who just under pressure know what needs to happen, that's great, as much as I need to learn to communicate how I think through things [inaudible 00:09:24] other people know that. So that's important, I'm glad you mentioned that.

Jill James:

Yeah, I mean isn't that funny? Like you have said you like to think through things. Me too, and I call it daydreaming. And so if there's a task in front of me, I may be daydreaming about that task for a week, for days. I might be hiking or like you said biking and daydreaming through the process and then, back against the wall, all that daydreaming ... comes to fruition. Anyway, all of our processes are so interesting. It would be great to just have a conversation on what's your process, what's your process.

Scott DeBow:

I think so.

Jill James:

Yeah. So the military really engaged you where you needed to be.

Scott DeBow:

It was good, and you know, once I got out of the physical therapy associate or technician school, part of that was at an army base, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. So mixed environment, military environment, that was new, that was interesting, and just the training was so good. There was cadaver labs, there was a rotation through BAMC, that's Brooke Army Medical Center and their burn unit, and you just ... At that point, there's such a gravity around your work because you're bedside next to someone who is seriously, seriously hurt. And they were doing everything right at the moment. It was a terrible accident. We can look back and say, "Hey, if these events had happened just a little bit differently, this probably would not have happened." But we're talking about children. We're talking about adults, seniors, just people that are really, really hurt and so ... So that was like the practical understanding of what I've been learning about and how important it is on such a human level. So ...

Jill James:

Yeah, and it really shaped you at such a young age to be able to kind of grab onto the fragility of life when you are a person who's in your probably then very, very early twenties.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So fast forward a few years, I qualify for an advanced PT school. And I was assigned my own clinic overseas, I was stationed in Sicily for three years, which is beautiful, an amazing place, that's an education in and of itself. Go live overseas in a different culture. Different pace of life, and it's a wonderful thing. But seeing people pretty much every day, patient after patient. I don't remember when it clicked for me or how long it took, but eventually, it clicked where the majority of these people coming through have a musculoskeletal injury, a trauma, they're in pain, and we can go back and say, "All right, at some point this was preventable. They're here, and at some point, the way they were taken care of early in the injury was directly correlated to how quickly they could go back to work."

And so that clicked for me, and the military would call that readiness and we call that, you and I call it, just return to work. How do we avoid lost time? How do we get people back to work faster? Well, it's really directly correlated with how do you care for the human being and certainly before injuries moving the discussions ahead of the injuries as I like to say, but if they are injured caring for the human, caring for that individual. So important, it has such a big impact on their life, on their families, on society, but certainly restoring them to full function. So when that clicked in that physical therapy clinic, I was an independent duty tech in Sigonella, Sicily, that was when it kind of started forming in terms of, "All right, well thinking more about prevention, from a preventive medicine standpoint." At least from the physical work environment.

Jill James:

Yeah. The musculoskeletal piece, yes.

Scott DeBow:

Yep.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

And so I served a total of almost eight years, got out, wanted to go back to school, and found myself working part-time, going to school part-time, and then had a great job opportunity to go work for an occupational healthcare company. It was called Concentra, you've probably heard of it, they're huge now.

Jill James:

And what were you going to school for? Were you studying physical therapy or what were you studying?

Scott DeBow:

You know, I just needed to go back and get my core things out of the way. The things you don't get necessarily in the military, at least the enlisted education. So your English and the algebras -

Jill James:

Yep. All the things.

Scott DeBow:

... and biologies and so all the basics towards a bachelor's, and so working on that, going to school, and I got this job with this occ health company and it was largely drawing from the things I learned from in the military, so that was a bit of a bolt of lightning, where it occurred to me, "You mean the things I learned in the military and did at this job, I can start applying understanding in an employer setting?"

Jill James:

That's awesome.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. And that's where I started to cut my teeth on some of the basics around occupational safety. I learned about OSHA, I did like a million and one bloodborne pathogen trainings. OSHA 10 hours, OSHA 30 hours, and they trained me to teach those things but it always came back, it always came back to the same thing. During that season of my development career, it seemed to always come down to the same things. People and how we're communicating really matters in terms of creating a sense of ... a safe feeling, and a level of appropriateness to raise my hand and say, "Hey, something's wrong. I think we should do this different." And when those environments, those safe environments aren't in place, well, you see different outcomes. You see less efficiency. Communication and collaboration is difficult, and certainly from an injury outcome standpoint. So things I guess click for me slowly over the course of my life, but when they click, it really sticks.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and what you're describing is what we might call psychological safety, right?

Scott DeBow:

Yes. Thank you for saying that. Because that ... I mean, I don't know if I knew enough then to describe it, but that is such an important component of I think what we're about and what we need to be. Learning about and leaning into today.

Jill James:

Exactly, exactly, and I think so many people in our profession and so many of the guests that I've had on the show over the years. We always talk about the rapport and the importance of the rapport that we have with the employees. And that's what it's about. I mean this is psychological safety. We're building these relationships often one human being at a time but it's for the reasons that you just stated.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So from that season, I spent about eight years in that role, learning a lot. And it was during that time I heard about this designation called CSP. And I did not yet have my bachelor's degree. I was newly married and I had a baby, I was a full-time working parent, and heard about the CSP. And I don't know why it stuck, but I was really, really excited about it, and learning about that designation and talking to a few friends that had just received that designation, it just really kind of lit me up. I was like, "Man. Okay." That was the impetus to really go back to school and finish my degree. Because to achieve CSP, you need your bachelor's degree and it's like, "Okay, for me, that's it."

So I started going back to school full-time while I was working full-time. I'm sorry, going back to school part-time while I was still working full-time, and transitioned from the occ health company into an opportunity really with something I had come across periodically over the course of my career with Concentra, but it was ... You have a shared workforce, you have an employer that needs to accomplish work through partnering with labor providers, and that could be temporary labor providers, staffing agencies, contractors or both. In order to achieve what their business is about, in order to manufacture, make, assemble, ship their widgets and what they do for a living, it required a strategy, a labor strategy, to kind of create those shared work environments.

So I was introduced to my first staffing company at the time, where I was a safety supervisor, I was a physician, and I was pretty excited about it, you get things like a lot of autonomy, you go visit a lot of customers, and this was mostly focused specifically in general industry. But I'll tell you what, as a place to learn about safety, in a staffing environment where you don't have one employer management system, you have two, and then the perspective I was taught was from the perspective of safety and risk management was strongly influenced from a claims perspective. So there's an underwriting component, there's diligence that you need to ensure is satisfied before a staffing company would place their employees at a customer. And to be honest, that's a pretty low bar. The compliance requirements to do that, I think there's challenges with low levels of knowledge about what do we really need to look for. There's challenges from the standpoint of if my job is to go sell from a standpoint of get more clients that want to use our staffing services, and I'm also the one doing the risk assessment, there's a little bit of a competing interest there, right?

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

How does that affect my understanding of risk? How does if I'm that salesperson and I'm like, "All right, I need three more accounts by the end of the week, by the end of the month or I'm in trouble with my boss," how does that ... And so again, it takes me a while for things to click, but these things started to click over the ... As I grew as a safety professional, graduated, finally started working towards my CSP which is ... I passed on my first go round, but -

Jill James:

Wow. Yeah, we need to stop and just do an applause there because that's a huge deal.

Scott DeBow:

Well here's the thing, and I only mention that, I almost didn't mention that because it feels a little prideful. But I mentioned that because I would hope it would serve as an encouragement to others to give themselves time to do it. So I put myself on a very generous timeline that included years in that. ASP for me first and then CSP but each of those exams, I just gave myself a lot of time and then gradual increasing levels of accountability, about have I scheduled my exam yet, yes or no.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Process. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, process, there we go.

Jill James:

Yeah. Process. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

So I gave myself plenty of time, and that was very helpful for me.

Jill James:

Yeah. You know, you were talking about this ... As I was listening to you talk about when you stepped into the staffing world and the opportunity you were referring to, to be able to see all these different types of places of employment. So many of us are generalists. Because our field of work is so big and can be so broad. And there are a few places where you could do what you did, where you get to see such a broad sweep of where human beings work, staffing agency is one, the insurance world is another for people who are thinking about their careers. OSHA where I worked is another, where you have this opportunity to see all of these different work environments and I'm wondering once you got into that staffing role and you were thinking back to your work in occupational health, were you like, "Oh." Like when these people came in and described their work and you're helping them in an occupational health setting, you couldn't teleport yourself at that time probably into their work environment.

Scott DeBow:

That's right.

Jill James:

And all of a sudden, you're in the staffing world where you are seeing so many different types of employment settings. Now you're able to teleport yourself at any point, like, "Okay, this is what it's like, this is what it's like, this is what it's like,"

Scott DeBow:

You know, I've never thought about it like that, Jill, but you're right. Because I had two different perspectives, the advantage of being in an occ health post-incident and then being feet on the floor next to the people doing the job as well as alongside the managers and the business leaders from both companies that all have a job to do so to speak. So yeah, I like the way you described that. That was an important part of me growing as a safety professional, and I think about look there's ... It still comes down to people and how we communicate, and keeping it simple, but I think about the number of individual clients and accounts that we worked with individually to identify risk, put them on a program to get better, we would advance safety, we would make improvements, injury performance would go down, primarily measured by the number of claims, and largely based on the assumption that, "Hey, if we've had fewer claims this month, we must have done something right last month." Never mind the fact that luck could have a say in it, the variability within latent risk and those things.

Scott DeBow:

So I wasn't necessarily thinking about it at that level at that time, but what I did notice is how often we identify problems in safety after there's a lot of problems in safety. We focus a lot of energy and resources at those problems, so reactively. We go in and we do things, leadership is involved. We have a plan, you know? Maybe a five-point plan and they're good plans and we make good ... And then we put these things in place, but how quickly they become I guess uncoupled from the plan. And it could be something as common as leadership turnover. From a site manager, from a staffing company individual who's safety-sensitive information crosses their desk pretty regularly. What happens if they're out on PTO or if they leave the company and the same could be said, especially like at a GM level for the customer, for the host employer. You have turnover at a leadership level with one or either company in that case because you have two employers involved, and that really kind of made things come apart. So reliability was a factor. I was like, "Man. We just had all this progress. Why can't we sustain improvement?" So kind of ... Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.

Jill James:

No, I was just going to ask, I mean you're describing quite a progression in your awareness, in your work which gosh, we're all on that journey and path, and it sounds like you're kind of developing yourself and what are the main problems that you're really identifying, those key things that need to be solved?

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. You're right Jill, but if I could just pause for a minute and reflect on why was I ... Part of why I was learning these things was because the good teachers that just came across my path. Good teachers that came along the way and many of them were CSP level, they were our clients, safety leaders. Some of them could have been at HR, operations. Just good teachers that led well that I learned from, and how important that was and it encouraged and inspired me to ... As challenging as things can be in safety, especially in a joint employer environment, well here's the thing. What are we really doing when we say we're managing safety together in an interdependent, mutual understanding about how we're going to achieve better safety together? What are we really doing?

So it was the people. I think the people you meet and the books that you read change your life for the next 10 years. So I started learning about authors and reading authors but really the people that would just ... They were just good teachers, and a common trait with these good teachers, they were also great leaders and they had just a humility about them. There was very low pretention, they sincerely wanted better for the workforce. And so I just ... I don't remember many of their names, I just remember their influence on me. So that's kind of a thing -

Jill James:

Yeah, how they made you feel. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, and that's something I take with me. I hope and this is one thing I strive for, leave people with that state of feeling encouraged, feeling challenged, feeling, "Hey, it's okay if things aren't going your way from a safety standpoint." Examining why and getting people comfortable with the idea that, "Look, nothing's perfect, we don't want to hide failure. Failure's not a terrible word, what do we really have to learn?" And kind of to your point earlier about psychological safety within the safety profession. How important is that for us to really have a comfortable conversation about, "Man, I thought we were doing good here. We're not. My boss is coming in next week. The numbers don't look good. It's costing us money. How do we really talk about what's really going on?" So ...

Jill James:

Yep. Yep. Yeah, and I mean, that's all part of curiosity. I mean what you're describing and the things that you've learned in your career have really been out of a place of curiosity on your perspective and being curious enough to ask the hard and the deep questions so that you can apply those preventative strategies that really got you interested early in your career it sounds like.

Scott DeBow:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Jill James:

Yeah. So Scott, how long were you in that role with that staffing agency before you made your next move?

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. Three years. It was like exactly, it was exactly three years, and I had an opportunity to go work for you could say on one hand a nonprofit, but also known as a church, where an organization I'd been involved in that went from very, very small to very, very big super fast, and a friend of mine passed a bulletin across my dinner table and said, "Hey, so why is our church hiring a safety director?" And I said, "Well I don't know. I didn't know that they were."

So anyway, I reached out to them and said, "Look, I already volunteer in your music ministry. I show up and I set drums up on Friday nights. I'm already doing things, and this is the area I work in. Could I volunteer in your, I don't know, whatever you're trying to do, safety." And they wanted me to apply for the job so I did. And the challenge they were having is one they had grown very, very quickly, life safety was a big factor. And look for me, I had been, up until this point in my career, I had been a guest in somebody else's facility in order to do work. So I would go in and evaluate others and then I'd communicate, "Hey, there's gaps here. People are taping down the interlocks or the buttons on the two-hand controls." It was that type of thing, or if something significant needed to be adjusted, it was somebody else's budget.

Well this role, it was initially life safety director, but just generally became a safety director focused on everything from life safety to communications between ... It was like a 14-acre campus, it would have thousands of kids there on the weekend, but you'd have activities going on every night of the week. Just to care for the needs of the community, really. But you'd have kids there, you'd have kind of a complicated array between three or four different buildings, and when it comes to being able to respond to someone has a cardiac event, a mom can't find their child, or as I came to find out, that if there's a police chase around the corner near the church, one thing that often happens is people run to a church if they're in trouble. That doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes, so what would happen -

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Safe harbor. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

Right. What would happen, and that's one thing that I loved about working there is like, "Yeah, we should absolutely be a safe harbor for everybody. Everybody." But we also realized, "Look, there's problems with the fire panel. Connecting the fire panel to an intelligent way we can understand where there might be alarm." Communications across ... I never knew really how a repeater worked until we had to install one to make sure we could connect to our ... Build out a team of volunteers and professionals that would just be everything from medical to medical responders for pediatrics and we just started building teams. Identifying problems and building teams, and I learned so much in three years. Until I got a call from a friend I had worked with at the previous staffing agency saying, "Hey, you know, so we're having some challenges with big accounts, national accounts." So in the staffing world, that would mean you have one customer that has 14 different sites, they'd generally do similar things but maybe with different product. Maybe they're making windows. Maybe one site makes windows for residential, maybe another site does it for commercial, but they're all generally the same, but there's sites all over the country, and they're having challenges answering questions around safety continuity or liability, managing risk with the primary employer, which is a staffing agency.

And we just started talking and started saying, "Well what would it look like if we built out a position that could devote only to improving safety at large accounts?" And so that was pretty cool. That was like the first time I was ever involved in really writing my own job description.

Jill James:

Fun.

Scott DeBow:

Which was fun, but here, it was really connected to my own personal mission is like ... I had a friend recently say, "Look, every year, update your personal mission and what you're about and how does it equate to benefiting what you're about." So I served as vice president of safety for national accounts at this company for the next three years. It eventually was acquired and grew into a VP role over a team, a safety team of about 18 to 20 safety consultants across the country and during this period, the next six years or so, really just began to really try to focus more on risk assessment and where previously my understanding was, "Well we need to go to the clients and really focus on where's the risks and hazards and problems at the client site?" Which was still true. And the question I would ask today is how are we creating safe work? How well do we understand the things we need to accomplish work safely today, and how comfortable are we raising our hand if things are different and stopping work. That's what I would ask today.

But back then, it was just occurring to me, "Look. We spend a lot of time outward facing. We need to kind of look in the mirror here," a little bit [inaudible 00:35:31] so to speak and say, "Well look, what is our process? Our internal process of understanding risk," and honestly until this point, the process for the team had been, "Well how many claims have we had over here last month?"

Jill James:

Versus ... Yeah.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. Versus what's our understanding of the present level of risk across the portfolio of accounts. And so perhaps that was another aha moment for me. We started tuning and gearing our teams a little differently, as best we could, to try to understand, "Look, when things change, when we have a site leader leave, when do we have opportunity to really understand the nature and the present level of risk at these sites? Let's try to be a little more strategic." And that kind of worked okay. What I realized there is to do that well, you do need some technology, especially if you're a big company to keep everybody connected on the same platform, to be able to connect what you're seeing in your [RMA 00:36:39] system, your claims systems and being able to connect it with what you see in your business systems in terms of new accounts, the number of people that are on assignment, the number of new accounts. How about when a leader turns over in a sensitive area? When should we know about that as a safety team? And so we kind of were lacking some of those connections and then -

Jill James:

Yeah, these are things that you can't simply manage at that scale through email and clipboards.

Scott DeBow:

Right, right. And I think I was really beginning to appreciate the difference between a safety person that can show up with their best intentions to make the best change and be exactly right about what needs to happen for better safety but who's really responsible for enabling that? For resourcing? That's your tone from the top, that's your leadership, leaders kind of setting and resetting expectations and casting the vision and recasting the vision for how we need to work, and being really aware of like our role as a primary employer traditionally, what I've heard in the staffing community is like, "Look, we're required and responsible to due diligence and to make sure compliance is in order," and that's not inaccurate. But the opportunity to improve risk capabilities, to improve system capabilities, to be more in tune with fluctuating levels of risk in a joint employer environment has really been missing.

And so that's where I started connecting my personal mission to safety management systems. What does a safety management system look like within a joint employer environment within a staffing agency? So it was about that time I got another call, and an opportunity turned out for me to go work at Randstad, which I had been there about three years, three and a half years. So cool things you learn about yourself I guess as you go through the decades so to speak.

Jill James:

Yeah. I mean that's exactly it.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, is I'm a builder, I'm a builder. And I can look back and I was always like, "Look, I do great things in three to five year increments, and I need to go do something different. I'm a builder, I'm good at it. I'm really good at it. I'm good at getting people and teams to align on a common purpose, a common goal, working through conflict, working through differing opinions." That's one thing Randstad taught me well is crucial conversations, anything that involved differing opinions, emotions are involved, there's differing opinions and there's high stakes. So I'm good at building teams and setting a course, setting strategy and direction.

But the problems I was hired to come in to really focus on were two things. One, help the safety team achieve its next level of maturity, outstanding team. That had been raised largely on the traditional method of, "Look, how many claims did we have last month determines where we go spend time this month." So limited optics into the true level of risk across the portfolio of accounts, so help them get up and look, we just ... I did not develop anything new, I borrowed from ISO 45001, right? What's at the center of a safety management system? Strong leader-worker participation, plan, do, check, act. So nothing new, but new in the realm of an employer such as this, who was by the way very open and super supportive. And in a way -

Jill James:

That had to be fun.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, it was. Because I appreciate how that in a way they my role was a bit non-traditional. I was a little unconventional. Everyone Randstad had hired up to that point was a director of safety level, a VP of safety level or risk or safety supervisor. So I came in as practice leader for risk and safety. So what does that mean? Right?

Jill James:

Yeah, right, right.

Scott DeBow:

So let's look. How are we practicing and advancing safety maturity? First with our own safety team, and then to really focus on the problem of serious injuries that are occurring to temporary workers that have been well-documented by OSHA, by Dr. David Michaels a few years ago when the OSHA temp worker initiative came out, but we continue to see I would say unique risks to a vulnerable workforce, and the temporary workers, contract workers, the contingent labor community in general is a vulnerable workforce. So the same risks, if I'm a traditionally employed worker working alongside a temporary worker, doing the same type of job, typically we see three things. There's a diminished risk perception. If I'm a temporary worker, I don't quite understand how I can get hurt doing this thing, and then we combine that with an increased risk tolerance where if I'm the temporary worker's boss and I say, "Hey, I need you to do this," you don't want to disappoint me, right? Assignments are short. This is a whole nother conversation Jill, I'm telling you. Psychosocial safety and how we manage risks in a shared work environment with psychosocial [inaudible 00:42:25] ... So if I'm working two or three temporary jobs to keep food on my family's table, and the client supervisor says, "I need you to go climb that ladder."

Jill James:

You go do it.

Scott DeBow:

You kind of go do it. That's exactly right. So the risk tolerance is increased, and then you combine that with limited mechanisms for me to raise my hand. First of all, culturally, it's just ... If I can shine light on any three things, it would be this area, the unique risks and vulnerabilities of temporary workers, because it's hard for them to raise their hand and just say, "That's different than what I was taught." And so how do we support them and that is my personal mission. Now I believe it's well-aligned with Randstad's mission, that's why we did so well. But we started focusing on the safety management systems internally, where we would look at ... In addition to getting our safety team current with just a better line of sight into the business metrics and the business intelligence, so we know when there's a significant increase in forklift assignments say in one site. Well, what is that location's ability to manage risk? Well they have a brand new branch manager or they're missing a branch manager. That probably needs more attention. Let's go direct, nothing has happened, no injury has happened, but business intelligence is coming into the levels, like we're making better risk ...

It's risk-based thinking, right? To borrow from ISO 31000. Risk-based thinking and risk-based decision-making through an intelligence use of business data, to help us know where to go. And so we did that with safety and for the ... We developed what we call our SIF intervention strategy, so serious injury and fatality, using our data to help us define our precursors.

So early days, we called it predictive analytics, and then I learned some more. I just realized the perception in our environment, and I don't want to harp on that term if other people see value and are exploring that, but the perception when we would say predictive analytics in our environment was, "Well, we're going to be able to predict where these incidents are happening. We can go and," that was our hope. That was our language. But it's not that perfect, right? I wish we could wave a magic wand and say, "Look, I think we're getting there and we're doing better," but we really started to advance and see significant decrease in ... a significant decrease in serious injuries along with a significant increase in the number of serious risks we were finding and being able to address that risk before it led to a serious injury. And so that was a -

Jill James:

You're making progress. That's huge. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. That was a strong, strong correlation, and we really started calling old-school predictive analytics, what we developed as our precursors. Here's the four things we were specifically targeting and building our optics and line of sight and intervention capability around and risk assessment capability around. It involves technology, communications, enablement, roles and responsibility. All of these things from safety management systems that so many companies are already doing and doing well we began applying internally and now are at the point where we're beginning to operationalize throughout the rest of the organization, and I wish I could tell you Jill that the number of serious injuries was zero, but I can absolutely tell you, it's significantly less than it was five years ago, three years ago.

Jill James:

Yeah. Congratulations and Scott, how did ... I mean sincerely, congratulations. That's fantastic for this group of the working population. I'm curious as I'm listening to you, how did the host employers take to what you were doing? Because you're applying things in essentially their work environment.

Scott DeBow:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sure. Well, the cool thing is ... Great question by the way, thanks for that. The cool thing is, I think a majority of what we were doing, they didn't know we were doing. We were already showing up and by the way, much of this occurred during COVID, where nobody was going to anybody else's sites. How do we manage risk when we're not allowed in, but a lot of what we were doing was just internally, systems management internally, that better tuned our leadership's understanding of where they need to voice communications, how quickly we rally around a business change, and so a lot of these things the host employer didn't even know we were doing or they didn't know we were doing it because of this new process, because of our development of safety management systems, because of our thinking around SIF intervention. And I think from a maturity level the organization is ready now to start taking these lessons and teaching host employers that don't know this. They don't know anything about precursors. Well how do we develop our precursors? The opportunity for knowledge sharing is rich, it's huge -

Jill James:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott DeBow:

... and if I could raise a flag and wave it and say ... If someone asks, "What should host employers and primary employers, what should they be working on together?" And first I'd say raising expectations for each other. Especially the clients, the host employer towards staffing companies. Raising expectations for what contributing to safety in a shared work environment means.

Jill James:

Right, right. Moving away from I need someone with a pulse to -

Scott DeBow:

Yes. Yes. Thank you, exactly. Yeah, and I think the second thing would be is like, "Look, how are we continually monitoring and assessing risk together? What are the things that change risk in our business model, along the continuum of work? Not at the beginning of the relationship, but along the continuum of work, anticipating error. How are we doing that? How am I telling you if I have a significant leader turnover that changes risk. And so how are they just sharing knowledge and teaching one another. I think informally that happens a lot. Not on a big industry-wide expectation level, but I think that's changing, and that's a good thing.

Jill James:

So it sounds like you've accomplished so much where you're just ending this phase, this chapter of your career with Randstad and you're moving into the next one. I mean does this seem like the right place in our conversation to ... I mean you've got a couple of days before you start the next gig. Like let's reflect a little bit. Do you mind reflecting out loud? Like why are -

Scott DeBow:

No. Let's reflect. Let's do it.

Jill James:

Okay, okay, awesome. So why are you still in safety today?

Scott DeBow:

Oh man. What a good question. I think I don't know if I could not do it, to tell you the truth. It's sincerely what I think about. I think if you're in the profession long enough, or if you work long enough, you'll have things that just ... You'll meet people that impact you and you'll experience things and things will begin to occur to you. So I'd say it was maybe five, I don't know, eight years into kind of my safety career when it hit me that, "So I have a three-year-old now. What would it be like for him to hear his mom answer the phone, Dad's not home, but he hears his mom answer the phone, and doesn't know that much except Mom's upset and he hears, "Well what do you mean he's hurt? Oh my gosh, what hospital is he at? Why can't we come see him?" And all he knows is that Dad's hurt, we can't go see him, and he was at work."

So probably something, I wish I could say I put this all together before I had kids, before I entered the safety profession. But man, it's just things ... And I think this happens with us. Things like this happen that cement in our mind what we're about really matters and it's absolutely connected with how we're setting up future generations to impact safety better than we're doing it today.

Jill James:

Yep. Yep. Yep. That's right, and I can tell you as a parent of a child who is now out of high school, those first jobs that your kids get in high school, Scott man, it's a nerveracking time for those of us who are health and safety professionals.

Scott DeBow:

I bet, yeah.

Jill James:

Like I was just trying to teleport myself into that work environment where my child took his first job, and trying to describe the hazards before he went there and what mitigation looked like, what things he needed to be careful about and now in college is studying engineering. And I'm -

Scott DeBow:

Awesome.

Jill James:

Yeah, right? And so I'm thinking ahead, but this next generation, you mentioned it. Your child's generation, my child's generation, the dominant workforce generation right now, it's different. It's different than generations before because of their lived experiences. And their level of knowledge and I think ... I don't know to be so bold as to say I feel like the dominant generation in the workforce right now which is our millennial generation and then coming right up next to them is Generation Z, they're more empowered to ask curious questions than I think previous generations.

Scott DeBow:

Yes. I feel like that's spot on. I see that as well, and that is such a good thing. Right?

Jill James:

Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, yeah. And maybe won't be as apt to, "Boss says do X. Okay. I'm just going to do this though it feels not right in my gut, or maybe I wasn't trained that way."

Scott DeBow:

Well I think about just culturally what does that give us. So being naturally curious I think is always a good thing. That shouldn't stop just because we set foot in a production floor or a work environment, but held up as an admired trait. But what happens when it's okay to be naturally curious and ask questions here, fostering a sense of ... That's an enabler, that's a contributor towards healthier culture and should be promoted. So yeah, that's insightful. I like how you said that, naturally curious, promoting that. And I'd say a much more heightened sense of awareness of what should good organizations look like?

Jill James:

Right.

Scott DeBow:

Right? What are the attributes of a healthy good organization that's promoting ... I don't know, I think about attention to safety, environmental, DEI and even abilities. So really, I think it's really cool. I think there's five generations in a shared workforce these days, but yeah, certainly millennials, Gen Z are the largest component of that right now.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. Yeah, and I mean millennials get so much flack and I honestly don't understand it. I've never understood it. I've been working with millennials for the last probably ... I don't know, 10 to 12 years in my career. And I've only ever seen them be hard, hard workers. Very curious, and through my own bias lens, unexpected leaders. I'm like, "Wait? What? What?" I mean it's been so good. It's been so good.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, yeah. I see that too. So for a generation that's never known what it's like to grow up without technology, that just has to be different. So I think that's important for ... I think where I am, to think about that and appreciate it is like their frame of reference for knowledge and learning information and how quickly that occurs. I mean it wires your brain differently. It wires thinking differently, and that's a thing that I think is important that if we could just say, "Look, in one word, that should be respected." Respect. That should be appreciated, respected, and now that's two words, I know, I'm sorry. But the thing is is like what's our role in teaching and leading well to the generation coming in behind us? And so that's a mutual appreciation and respect, creates an interdependency that is so vital. So yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's spot on and we should be thinking about that as safety professionals.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. So in your reflection here on why you're in safety and what our current role is, I know that you're working on something else that we haven't talked about yet and I'm wondering how you're squeezing all this in, but you're writing a book.

Scott DeBow:

Oh yeah, that's right. That's right.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Scott DeBow:

Thanks for reminding me. So it's been through one round of editing and I'm -

Jill James:

Wow.

Scott DeBow:

... re-editing and updating. Hopefully by the end of 2022. This is my first book. I don't know how long it takes to do these things. But my approach to writing the book was the same as my approach to getting my CSP. I gave myself plenty of time, don't know what it looks like. It's been described as very casual and I think safety, a lot of safety books are academic. I don't know if I could come across as an academic author very well and probably shouldn't because it wouldn't be authentic. But the book is this, it's Safety Management in a Joint Employer Environment. And it talks a lot about what we've talked about now.

It goes into ... opens with where do we get our concept of work from, and respecting human beings in general when we're in the work environment. And as a safety professional, what struck me is the people I've worked alongside that maybe are a generation ahead of me, had a lot to do with shaping the way I approach work. And so my dad was a bit of an engineer, mechanic, and I grew up just like, "Look, you don't leave tools laying around. You clean them and put them away." Everything has a place. A place for everything. The value would be on we'll get everything just perfect before we put it all together and later on in life I began to work with someone that their experience with work was based on who influenced them. It was their father that was also a mechanic that grew up on a farm fixing farm equipment and when farm equipment comes in and there's not a lot of money, you fix it however you can. And the value was if you got to hold it together with a leather strap and your belt buckle, you make it happen. And I'm not doing them service describing this, but they make it happen so that the equipment gets back out in the field and it's done and food's on the table and that is the value imparted from one generation to the next.

So now just fast forward to where Scott shows up in a warehouse or a manufacturing environment, alongside a mixed group of employees that all have different leaders that imparted the concept and the value of work to them. I could be technically accurate, Jill, and what I say is like, "We need to do this. We need to not do that." The messaging can be spot-on, but if we don't respect the workers, and especially temporary workers. We don't respect our messaging to them. We can be 100% accurate and right in what we communicate, but if we don't connect to the value and appreciation that what they learned from, the value of work in that moment, they're completing work in a series of system pressures and competing interests that I don't have to manage, I know about. But how are we really sending our safety message?

So that's where the book starts. It goes into a little of the history of the staffing industry, OSHA's influence, which I think ... I really have never had a negative experience with OSHA. I have to say, people can say they've had a negative experience with Scott in safety. So I mean I'm no different than OSHA in that respect, but overall, OSHA in collaborating and they've done work in terms of being inclusive with their recommended guidelines for safety management systems. Includes multi-employer work sites. Then we talk about the consensus standards and at the end of the day, the message is it's time to raise expectations for how primary and host employers work together to achieve better business to deliver the safety outcomes everybody says that they want. It's time that we raise the bar there, and I believe we can do it. I think the answer is market-driven expectations, consensus standards, leveraging knowledge and consensus standards.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right.

Scott DeBow:

So that's what the book's about.

Jill James:

That's fabulous, and honoring the work of human beings and that every human being has a right to a safe and healthy work environment and every employer has that responsibility.

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. Well-said. Well-said.

Jill James:

Yeah. Well, congratulations on getting the first draft to the editor. That's huge, and we'll have to have you back on the podcast once you've got it published so we can talk about it, because this is information that needs to be shared.

Scott DeBow:

Okay. Thank you.

Jill James:

Absolutely, absolutely. So in your liminal space time here between Job A and Job B, we were talking about where you're at with safety today, what our role is, and you've touched on this so many times throughout our conversation, the value of relationships and what that means to our work and the things that we're noticing about human beings and meeting them where they are. And I had the great opportunity to listen to you speak when we were at this joint conference speaking together this week to talk about one element of those relationships and meeting people where they are and knowing human beings and it was on neurodiversity. Do you mind talking about that?

Scott DeBow:

Yeah, yeah, not at all. So -

Jill James:

Maybe set the stage for that, yeah. Because I'm not sure I did it justice. Yeah.

Scott DeBow:

So I'll tell you what. So having just departed Randstad, one of the things Randstad does so well is their concept is human forward, really well-built attention and leadership in the realm of DE&I in terms of creating what they call business resource groups. So business resource groups, African-American heritage, Hispanic community, there's military, and they recently added, so DEI/A, right? Which is abilities. So AIM is the business resource group for abilities in motion is the one I had been a part of and one thing we also really focused on is [LEAN 01:04:00]. So small incremental improvements and how are we continually doing that and building a LEAN culture, and we were on a LEAN call, like kickoff, for the year and a courageous brave soul spoke up and just shared her experience about neurodiversity. And I was thinking, "Okay. I feel like I should be able to articulate what that word means." But I just was not informed or educated.

And so I reached out to her and said, "Hey, thanks for speaking up. I learned something. Do you have a few minutes to tell me more?" And she was like, "Yes. Come on, let's make it happen." And we had a conversation later and the conversation went like this, we introduced each other, she talked to me about neurodiversity, her experience was in the realm of dyslexia as well as being a degree on the spectrum. And she was telling me these things and so Jill, here's the thing, and let my naivete and kind of poor listening here be a lesson for all of us, but she told me these things early in the conversation and we're talking and talking and she's already told me that she grew up with dyslexia and she already told me that reading is not her thing and she learns really, really well over here. In fact if you give her a dataset, she'll see patterns no one else sees, because that's how gifted she is. She's already told me this, and what do I ask her 10 minutes later?

Jill James:

Could you write that down?

Scott DeBow:

Yeah. It wasn't that, but it may as well have been. I was like, "So have you read this? Do you like, have you ever read?" And she said, "No," and she was so gracious. She recognized where I was in my undeveloped thinking in that moment, and she taught me, she reminded me, I was like, "Okay, Scott's a listener up to a point, but then he changed here, and so how well was I really listening?" And there's a degree where we can listen to respond or listen to learn and I was like, "Okay. You know what? Learning moment for me, because this woman was courageous and gracious and taught me," and that's a lesson from the neurodiversity community that I think we can all benefit from because truly it's an entire workforce that is gifted in areas we are not. And we should know that. So that's like where we start promoting the beauty and the value of just promoting people's giftedness and enabling that and sharing in that is really what it's about, so ...

Jill James:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I mean working to our strengths, right? And knowing who you are, and also your employer to know what your gifts, your strengths are, and how it is that you best work and can best show up to support not only your own career regardless of what that career is, but also support the organization that you work in. You and I started out talking earlier about the way that we get work done. How our creative process works, and neurodiversity, it's part of it.

Scott DeBow:

That's right.

Jill James:

I mean all of these things make up the whole human being and how much better of a workplace and world can we be if our employers and we as individuals know those things about ourselves and we're not always trying to fix what is perceived as a wrong or the right way to do it but really engaging with our strengths. Like you just completely perfectly described. She was great at noticing patterns.

Scott DeBow:

That's right.

Jill James:

You know? That's so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that story. I appreciate that. So as we're coming to a close today, I'm wondering Scott, in this little bit of reflection that you have before you jump in with both feet into the next adventure here, things that you'd like to share with our audience. We have people in all stages of our working career, from people who are just starting out, people who are maybe still in college, people who are tenured in this profession, people who are retired. What are your pieces of wisdom you'd like to share with any piece of that audience?

Scott DeBow:

Well sure. I guess like you mentioned ... So those that are ahead of me, they're in retirement or ahead of me in their career, just at some point, I've learned from you and I'm grateful and hope to pass that torch on to others who will be grateful and to do so with the humility that I think breeds humility and better leadership. So I'd share that. And to all my friends that are not just staffing agencies, but in the contingent labor community. So they are employers that are working with staffing companies or contractors, to staffing companies and contractors, is like, "Hey listen, the traditional view of how we think about safety is really important to learn about how limiting it is." We've been given kind of a status quo that repeatedly shows us, look, it does a pretty good job at setting up the business relationship but the status quo is not doing a good job at all at managing risk along the continuum of work, and we need to do better. We absolutely can do better and I think my final point Jill would be we can't do it alone. We can't do it alone.

So some of the groups I get to work with is like so ... so NIOSH is a pretty small division of the CDC, but they do amazing work. And they have these groups called NORA work groups, so National Occupational Research Agenda. There's one for contingent labor, there's one for traumatic injury prevention, but just ... It's a collection of academic and professional and regulators and insurance, all commonly coming together to focus on solving some pretty important problems. And if you think about, you probably have examples of ... We have an entrenched position and I'm the regulator and I have the checklist right here and you're not measuring up to it, how well does that really come across in terms of creating collaborative problem-solving?

Jill James:

It doesn't.

Scott DeBow:

It doesn't. [inaudible 01:10:44], but it doesn't. We need more, and I may have been doing this for a while and learned a lot, but I can't do it, I shouldn't do it alone. We can't do it alone. We need to solve some problems together and if there's any silver lining in COVID it's that, "Look, as a recent example, our leaders reached down to the organization and just asked, "Hey, is there a common framework for us to communicate safety and health from?" And we said, "Well yes, by the way there is, and let's talk about the hierarchy of controls in a shared work environment and how we identify, think about, and understand risk to lead to better decision-making." And so I think we already have the frameworks we need to draw from. We really need to get together in terms of collaboration and problem-solving and paying special attention that look, between each employer, there's a combination of transferring risk, one employer to the other, I won't say who. That's good for that one employer, and there's another set of employers here that's in the joint employer mix that is very, very eager to say in a sales-compressed environment, "Yeah, we'll do that for less money. We can do that at a lower markup. We can solve these things." But in so doing, this kind of weird mix removes capacity to manage risk.

And so we just need, I think we just need help. I do anything I can to help someone say, "Why should I care about this?" Because maybe I could do a better job at explaining it, but hey, it really matters and if you ever sat bedside next to someone that's been seriously hurt, we all ask the question. What do we wish we knew yesterday so we would not be here today, and we're only going to get there if we do things better together.

Jill James:

That's right. And to your point Scott, we are at such a unique place in this time right now. If there are benefits to having experienced and continue to experience a global pandemic, our profession has had this unique opportunity that you articulated for collaboration. When it happened, when this pandemic happened, we all remember where we were, what we were doing, and in our profession, we were engaged with in a way that professionally we likely haven't been engaged with before. We were invited to tables that we haven't been invited to before. It's all of the things that our industry has been talking about at conferences and writing about forever about how did you get a place at the table, how do you get a place at the table, how do you get your leadership to buy in, all of these things. It happened overnight when leadership and industries went, "Oh. Hey. Can you help us?" And like, "Here's a seat at this table and here's a seat at this table." And suddenly, we were overwhelmed. But we have a place at these tables and guess what? Those of us who were invited in and the people that you and I have been talking with are like, "We're not going back. Because guess what? We learned that many hands make light work."

Scott DeBow:

That's right.

Jill James:

"And we have collaborators now." And so I think that like, "Gosh, don't step back into that silo. Keep going forward."

Scott DeBow:

Well I think we all learned. I mean that makes me think of look, you know who I have a newfound respect for? Accountants, CFOs. They understand risk on a level I don't because they're responsible for numbers and making hard decisions around money, so the question becomes how am I doing better at informing them better? So they make better-informed decisions, because I so respect the CFOs and the leaders that are making hard decisions I don't have to make. But how can I make their job easier? How can I make their job better?

Jill James:

Right, right. So we're all making better, more informed decisions. Fabulous. Scott, thank you so much for your generous time and wishing you so much success, enlightenment and curiosity in this next chapter.

Scott DeBow:

Thank you Jill. Thank you so much. I hope we can do this again and thank you.

Jill James:

We will.

Scott DeBow:

Thank you very much for allowing me to be on your podcast.

Jill James:

You're welcome. Thanks for being here. And thank you all for spending your time listening today and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. 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. 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 health and safety professionals like Scott and I. Special thanks to [Nayeem Jarisi 01:15:41], our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.