In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Kevin Weaver of U.S. Compliance argues that workplaces can build a safer environment from the ground up by focusing on the fundamentals. Weaver is also author of Building a Strong Safety Culture: The 5 C’s of Workplace Safety, 2nd edition.

Below is an exceprt from the podcast:

Nicole Stempak: It's great to have you here today, Kevin. And I'm super excited to talk about the book. But first, I wanted to know what prompted US Compliance to first write this book in 2022 and then a second edition four years later. 

Kevin Weaver: Great question. Appreciate you asking, Nicole. We definitely started the book. You know, it doesn't seem like that long ago, 2022, but maybe it's because I'm getting a little older. When it first came out, it was two of our owners, Tim Sheehan and Chris Naylor, had put together the book. And really, it was a collection of stories that they saw a lot of similarities. And as it came together, it was a process, right? How companies could go out and do some of these things for themselves. And if they followed the process, they could actually do a little bit to increase their safety culture.

Now, a lot's changed, sadly, even in the last four years. And, you know, it was time for an update. So within our group, we looked at some of the things going on a macro level, which is really one of the big things is just talent right now, trying to find EHS people. There's such a shortage out there. And we said, you know what, let's work this through. Let's build this, especially for those small to medium-sized entities that they just can't find the resources. We got people multi-hatting things, and let's put together a program that would work. And that's how this guide came together.

NS: Yes, the second edition in just four years, right? Like it sounds on paper a little sudden, but you think about how much the world has changed and it's as though a decade has passed, right? So many technologies, and... social, political, you know, just every facet of life seems different.

KW: A really good example that kind of outlines this is, and we'll pull some numbers here. In 2024, every school with industrial safety, occupational safety in the United States was graduating just under 2,000 students. In the same year, coming out of BLS, there was under 20,000 positions open in the EHS field. There's not remotely enough students to cover these open positions. And a lot of big companies, you know, AI's data centers, such a popular area right now, are scooping up a lot of people. So if you're in a traditional manufacturing setting, you're not finding anyone. So you're trying to sometimes promote people off the line, graduate people in, you're taking people that maybe haven't had a lot of experience yet. And then you couple that with the average age of an EHS professional right now being about 59. We're starting to age out. So there is a major need for EHS professionals right now. And a lot of your readers are starting to see this and we put up ads and we might be waiting three, six months trying to find someone. And sadly, even the turnover rate is extremely high. So when you start to see some of that kind of coming together in the background, it's like we aren't going to find the perfect individual. So how are we going to grow them? How are we going to take some really engaged people we have in the facilities and make them safety experts? And that's a big part of what this is all about.

NS: I also like that the book dovetails with what we see as far as people taking many journeys to safety too. It can be a second career, it can be something, as you said, people being promoted or kind of discovering later after any formal education, too, because a lot of people say, I never heard of this before. I didn't know this was a thing. 

KW: Some of the absolute best safety professionals have no formal background whatsoever, but highly engaged. And I would say if there's a theme behind the book, and it's on safety culture, what it's really, you know, the other term for that is engagement. And so we want to find those champions, those people that know the operations, those people that have just lived in it for years and know every little loophole and shortcut. And, you know, to take someone like that within a facility, especially the smaller ones where they don't have those resources and promote them into the role where they can be successful is very powerful because they'll stay a long time and they'll have a lot of pride behind what they do.

There's a stat in the book, and you'll see again, we focus on Gallup. You know, Gallup surveys, I think now it's close to 196,000 different companies, but they've been doing it since the 1930s. They have a sample population on the Gallup survey of 31 million responses. So it's not small math, right? We can do great statistics on it. Well, currently in the US, about one-third of employees are engaged at work. One-third. That means two out of every three people literally might be working against you. They're not concerned. And the number one kind of metric behind that is safety. When you have an engaged workforce, safety rises. And so when we start to talk about how we improve and how we do things, you know, it is all about measurement, and measuring employee engagement, not measuring compliance and some of the other things that we frequently do, can be one of the biggest powerful drivers behind this.

NS: I wanted to ask for those who haven't yet read the book, can you explain, you know, just briefly what the five C's are and how they relate to each other and to safety?

KW: I would say the biggest part of the five C's, commitment, compliance, culture, champions, and cost, and I know I won't repeat those too badly, is really about a process. And so they're not five steps, they're 5 dimensions. If you take out one of them, the whole thing falls apart. Now, we've also seen systems like this with ISO 45,001, 14,001. The purpose here was to create the system and dial it back to really manageable steps for people. And #1 is not cost, it's commitment.

So is leadership within an organization really committed to starting off and saying, we want to be safer. We want that engaged workforce. We want to drive culture. When you have that, it becomes very powerful. That leads us to that second step, compliance. In compliance, for way too long was determined to be where we're 100% compliant, right? We're the greatest company ever. Compliance is the floor. It is the minimum. And fortunately, you have to have a floor to build up. And so we do have to get there. Compliance gets you to about 60% of a strong program.

But once you have that in, that's when you can start to focus on the shared behaviors and belief systems, the culture. And once you start determining what the culture is, and the real key is measuring culture, you can start to engage the workforce. And a couple of things we kind of champion within that is finding champions, right? Who are those special people on the floor that just influence everyone else? Who are the people that everyone else is following? Who are the people that are really passionate about it? Who is going to take that step and say, hey, wait, you're not wearing your safety glasses. We got to get this guard back on the machine, the little things. But the things that happen in a flash, the things that a safety manager can't see all day long, right? But we and shouldn't be the one responsible. So promoting them into really driving the culture.

And then at the very last, that 5th C is getting down to the costs, the business case. And the argument we make in there, and I think a lot of your listeners have done this themselves, is safety isn't a cost. An effective safety program drives profit within a company, and the amount of data to support that and the way that can be framed up to leadership is a very powerful statement every EHS professional should be able to do. There's an ROI, and it's very easy to show within safety when it's done right.

And that just helps kind of reinforce and get stronger commitment. And another dollar invested might save another $2. And so then we start that cycle again. But it's very much a process and it's about maintaining the flow and being very consistent with it.

NS: I appreciated the way that the book was organized, you know, breaking everything down. And I found myself just wondering, can building a strong safety culture really be that simple and also that complicated, right? Because it's not just one specific isolated thing. It's lots of things happening all at once with everyone. You could say coming together, sitting at the table, but everyone buying in and doing their part.

KW: Certainly, it's not that simple. It's also not that hard, right? And so we float somewhere in the middle of it. What it is, though, is following that structure and being very deliberate about it, right? We can't go out and have a different opinion a month later. We have to always send the same message.

I talked a little bit about Gallup. One of the things we get into the book in particular, there's three questions that help drive culture and sustainability. And I think they exemplify how easy some of this can be accomplished. I have the materials and equipment to do my work right. The average response on that is 3 people agree, strongly agree out of 10. If you can move that number from 3 out of 10 to 6 out of 10, you will drive your safety incident rate up 32%, or down, I should say. So if you want to see an improvement immediately, I have the materials and equipment to do my work right. And it's as easy as maybe setting up a quarterly review to talk to people, walk through, do you have the right tools? Do you know where they are? And if you can do that and drive that up over the course of 31 million responses, we know you will see fewer safety incidents. The second one is at work, my opinions seem to count.

Literally, the people doing the job every day are the ones that need to be doing it the safest, the ones that know when something's not right. Sometimes getting the voice that, getting that culture started. And very similar. Three out of 10 people in the industry right now strongly agree. If you can drive that to six out of 10, and again, six out of 10 is a reach for the sky, it's 60%, you will see a 40% improvement on your incident rate.

Imagine A 15-minute conversation twice a year with your frontline employees, supervisor, setting up something that easy, right? No major cost. And you can see a 40% improvement on safety incidents.

And then the last one in there as well is in the last six months, someone at work just talked to me about my progress. That same talk, that same walkthrough, moving from a three out of 10 to a six out of 10 will drive 34% fewer safety incidents within a company. And so you take those 3 little questions and it becomes very easy to go out and really improve safety incidents. And we've seen this over millions of responses. The problem is people don't always get out and do it, right? And we don't know where to start. So that's what the book helps to do. We learn how to measure it. We make sure people are equipped. We listen and we kind of grow them as professionals in the field.

NS: At one point in your book I wrote in the margin, safety is love language because some of the things that you're describing and that are described in the book are talking about just seeing people and caring for them, not willing to overlook something.

KW: It’s so much about not only identifying those champions out there, but it's engaging with them. And it's all about who the work goes home to. Right? We know and we've seen the boards where we have all our family members up there and what we like to do, why we come to work. And it's making sure we get back engaging people so that you know why they're doing this is very important. And so when you get in there and you're trying to determine who some of these people should be and where we want them to do, one of the best things is getting those engaged folks on the safety committee. An effective safety committee should be at least 50% and likely more than 50% employee-based. You don't want your safety committee being purely your managers and just leaders within a company that can make quick decisions because getting the engagement across your organization involves getting them.

It's finding someone from every shift in every department, at least representing them on some level, not just days, the natural helpers we talked about earlier in the conversation. It's also about rotating the seat out there every so often. So it's maybe not once a year, once every two years, we always have new members coming on, old members going off. And so we start to get that broad employee engagement from the floor level. And that gets people who care involved. It starts driving all these great things we're talking about.

NS: The thing that always strikes me about safety is that professionals are being tasked with planning for the impossible, right? It's just impossible to plan for all these different scenarios. And work rarely happens in a vacuum or in these ideal circumstances. So with that being said, how do you advise clients to approach safety and emergency preparedness so that they don't necessarily have kind of an encyclopedia of what to do in every situation, but they know how to keep their employees safe, kind of regardless.

KW: It's important, and we've talked a lot here about just building a process and being diligent to it. I think it's equally important to recognize that everyone's answer is going to be a little bit different and every organization is going to be a little bit different, if we take the broad steps and we start to follow those. That's where we're going to start to see progress.

And so when you go across the five C's, we want to start with that commitment. On some level, we have an executive sponsor. And ideally, they're signing off on the safety policy and it's front of everyone. Everyone else may even. But we go out, we walk the facility, we find those gray rhinos. In a perfect world, we're also doing a baseline survey up front just to see what engagement's like. That costs virtually nothing and a small amount of time. If you can get that level of commitment, identify kind of your baseline, get that baseline assessment done in the first 30 days, you're off to the races because now you can take the next month and build that engine.

Look at the safety committee. Do we have the right champions? And in a very small way, set a few priorities because we've done the inspection, we know a few things we want to get going. And I would encourage organizations to set two to three priorities. One of the most common things that people have pitfalls on is they want to set 7 or 10. They're excited. We just got this going. Let's do everything we can think of. And you're more likely to fail by trying to do too much than trying to do the right amount and taking it to completion. So set a few priorities and within that inspection, set a few, you know, standard rules for the team, right? 

And one I love to encourage is when you identify something or someone brings up an issue. Identify a response in 48 hours. Someone brings you an issue, hey, this is unsafe for you, get in a near miss form. And you're responding back to the team at the next month's meeting. It's way too late, right? Get an answer right away. So now you've set a commitment, you've kind of revamped the team, you've done some inspections.

And then the real part on that, which I kind of just said, is really take that third month now, make it visible. And visible might be indicating some of your leading indicators. Here's how many near miss forms we're getting every month. Here's how many inspection items we found. Here's our training completion percentage. It's also part of that's going to be vulnerable. As we start to communicate those things, we also want to relate and tell our safety story. When you have employees that you've found those champions, a lot of times they have a very powerful story they can share and why it's important to them. That will help engage the rest of the force.

And then hold those first progress conversations with people. You're out asking them what's going on. Hit everybody. And if you can do that in the first 90 days, you are moving on a path that's custom to your facility. You're on a blueprint where you're going to start to see all the elements of the five C's come together, and you get kind of that first turn of the flywheel, I'm going to call it, because it is very much cyclical.

NS: Thinking about the five C's, I wondered, how universal versus how specific safety plans need to be.

KW: Great question. I've been in the industry now 30 years. I've been in and out of over 1,000 facilities. I've worked in 15 countries. And everyone's got a little bit different rules, different regulations, different expectations. Every industry, you know, they kind of follow their own. And so it can be very specific, but at the base level to be effective, there's great consistency. And so when you keep the steps broad, you focus on the differences you have internally. That's where it'll start to come together and you don't have to worry about being too specific on things. When you get down to specific operations and maybe something as low as a job hazard assessment, right, where we've gone through our job safety assessment, we've determined those are going to be highly specific and you want them to be to your operation.

When you think about trainings, a lot of people are doing online trainings nowadays. It's great. It's effective. It's how we can get to a lot of people. It's helpful for tracking. You know, if you're watching a 30-minute forklift video and now you're an expert, you start driving, really might not be making the cut. And so it's so important to dial it into your own organization exactly what you want to see. And that's where you have to have that internal team that can say, no, no, here's our operation. Here's why we're doing it a little differently. And here's what our people need to know. 

I'm a big fan of online training and doing things, but it has to come with some face-to-face, some site-specific awareness. And there's some cool things now happening with AI where, you know, safety professionals can start to develop their own materials and be even stronger with it and get those specific elements together. And I think we'll see that continue to be better too.

NS: One thing I hear a lot is people talking about how to speak or translate safety for other stakeholders. And I wondered if you had any recommendations or suggestions, perhaps for what they should keep in mind during their interactions or how best to communicate what their needs or requests are.

KW: I'm going to say the modern EHS professional has a very big ask. They have to work with the front line and more and more they're being brought into the boardroom. And you're talking at very different people with very different eye sets at both of these levels. And there's not a lot of education for that with EHS professionals. 

And so I think one of the more powerful things organizations can do is continue to develop their own internal people so that they're effective on the floor, they're effective in the boardroom. And if they can start to get those business skills and couple that with all the technical skills that make a great EHS professional, as they evolve in their careers, they're going to be very powerful. Now, that's going from the top of the organization to people starting right out in the organization. 

The other part is communicating back to the workers as well. And there's very few companies out there now that truly do things in one language, and you can translate materials and have it multiple languages that may not work either. So it is a multimedia effort of videos and demonstrations and multiple translations and figuring out what that mix is for your group to get these things right. And that's where getting an EHS professional in that's kind of been through some of this can be pretty powerful as well. I've seen time and time again, you know, effective safety people out there doing some of this and all of a sudden quality or production starting to follow the same model because they are doing it really well. It's no one answer and you shouldn't go to any training, any event, any initiative with only one way of doing it.

It needs to be multimedia focused, it needs to be in languages and ways that people understand things. Because we're working with new people that have grown up in a world of online school and we're working with people that have been very hands-on for 40 years. You know, they're not pulling up an SOP all the time. And so we’ve got to be really smart and diligent about how we go through that.

NS: You bring up something else that speaks to kind of culture as far as like the need or the want for that instant gratification. As usually we talk about it in terms of buy-in. So getting folks on board with a plan, and wanting to get those instant results to help build. I mean, we even have a term for it, low-hanging fruit.

KW: You know what? You're right. We want a lot of excitement. The worst thing we want to do is kick off energy and we're starting a new program. We've revamped our safety committee and now there's just no cadence. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit. There's some quick boosts out there that just jumpstart this whole 5Cs flywheel. And you know what? They're easy. Pick something visible this week.

I've said a couple times now, when we find a hazard, a near miss, close it out in 48 hours and make it public. Word travels faster than any memo or e-mail that goes out there. When people can see that, you've gone a long ways. We talked about that leadership commitment. Well, if you're the EHS professional, you better be signing the policy yourself. In fact, put it up on the board, have everyone, encourage everyone to sign it. Celebrate the streak. We've been going well and everything's been going very smoothly. We have days and everything's going forward and just mark this milestone. We've seen change. Show up at the training, encourage leadership to show up at the training.

What's more powerful than sitting in a training when the company president or the CEO shows up or even just kicks it off and says, hey, this is important to me too. It's talked a little bit about being vulnerable. Share your safety story. Where was that time when it clicked into your world, where it was important to you?

And then I think on the big piece, kind of the last, is that at every leadership meeting, ask a closing question. This is something I like to do with safety committees. Right? We've gone through, we've talked about everything, we've come up with plans. And now that that's all done, this group that knows everything going on right now. What's the biggest risk on the floor today? You'd be blown away how often that answer comes back and it was nothing you just spent the last hour talking about. And so there's great opportunity in that. And so there's a lot of low hanging fruit. And again, I'll emphasize, none of it costs a cent and it's not even extreme time dependent. It's just being diligent, putting it up there, and just really putting it out there for the world to see.

NS: I love that. I do think it's a balancing act to have, you know, do the goal setting process because some things can't be achieved in a week. You know, some things are year-long initiatives. And so I just wondered if you had any advice for safety professionals on how to set real X realistic expectations and to divvy them up, you know, in that short, medium, and long-term time frame.

KW: It can be tough. And as much as some things are really quick, sometimes realistically, it can take longer. We have 300 ladders within the facility and 200 are dented, corroded, falling apart. And I would love to write that CapEx and go out and replace 200 next week. But in reality, I can't even find the contractor that can get in there and do it that quickly. And we need to develop a plan.

I think that's going to be the consistent answer everywhere, right? Let's develop the plan, determine what we want that end goal in, and then let's set legitimately some milestones. Now, maybe that is we are going to fix 10 ladders a month, 20 ladders a month, I don't care what it is, as long as you're moving the right direction. Because again, what matters in all of this is what your employees are seeing. It's going to go a long ways. They all know you have broken ladders. They all know they're dangerous. But now we've not only acknowledged it, we've developed a plan and we're fixing it on a very consistent cadence. And maybe something changes. And instead of doing 10, we have to do 15. We want to come up with maybe an interim plan of how we can work around these, right, but it's communicated, it's well known within the facility, and we know at the end of 12 months, maybe we're going to be done. The alternative is, we know it's dangerous. We know you're using it. Just be smart about it. That doesn't mean anything. And we cross our fingers, you know, and hope is not a strategy as we all know.

NS: All right, it's been great talking with you. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for our listeners today?

KW: My biggest thing is, don't delay. It's put the plan in place now. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be moving in the right direction.

A lot of times today, safety culture is almost a buzzword. It's overused. And the thing is, it's measurable. You can affect it. And it doesn't matter where you are today, you can improve. And you can do it very easily. And so make sure you get that commitment. That is important and it is the first C. And once you have that, you are driving this thing and moving forward. And just keep it steady. Don't worry about massive changes. Get a few low-hanging fruit and you will see the improvements you want to. And so it sometimes sounds really difficult and sometimes it really can be.

But generally getting started is a pretty easy thing to do. And you just want to find that process and keep moving forward on it. And if you do, you'll have all the success you want.