Podcast: Innovative strategies for employee wellbeing and suicide prevention
Key Highlights
- Expand EHS programs beyond PPE and compliance to address the whole person, including fatigue, mental health, and overall well-being.
- Build cross-functional teams with HR, marketing, insurers, and outside experts to develop effective safety programs and reach employees.
- Equip job sites with Narcan and train workers in overdose response. Shawmut expanded its program from 50 pilot sites to training 300 superintendents.
- Start small, communicate consistently, and train peer supporters to address mental health and substance use challenges before they escalate.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Shaun Carvalho, chief safety officer at Shawmut Design and Construction, discusses how organizations can develop comprehensive safety and wellbeing programs that go beyond traditional PPE, emphasizing mental health, substance abuse, and inclusive communication strategies.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
Adrienne Selko: Can you talk about the process of creating a program within your organization, and also what was the workforce reaction to this program?
Shaun Carvalho: Great question. Honestly, this work really began more than 10 years ago, as I really think about it. In 2010, we started with our first annual safety week. And we realized very quickly as we were planning that week with a wide variety of people that safety is certainly not just about PPE. It's not just about hard hats and boots and what happens on the job site. We opened up this opportunity for people within the company to really talk about things that were important to them. And we got such a variety of different ideas around the total person—on the job, in the office, in the workplace, at home, and in the community. The ideas ran wild, so we really started thinking about the total person. So we carried that through every year for Safety Week for several years. And as we continued to think about the total person, we started to learn about more of the issues that face us as humans every day of our lives. And that just opened the doors for so much learning and sharing of ideas, which really carries through to this day.
As you think about all the different issues that could face the world and that could affect us as we come to work every day, that’s really what we're trying to help, because ultimately people just need to feel safe and secure to be their best and that's what we're trying to get out of them every day.
AS: What was the reaction when you introduced this program and how did you move it through your organization to create an actual program?
SC: With the reaction. I would say mixed, right? So when you throw out unique ideas that people have never really heard of, you know, certainly on a construction site when we're talking about healthy eating habits, fatigue management. Back in the early days, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, these ideas were pretty unusual because people were used to hearing, like I said, the same topics on fall protection, on ladder safety, electricity, PPE. And then we're introducing these new topics, certainly during Safety Week, but many of them carried out throughout the year. So I would say a little bit mixed, but not really negative.
And ultimately, there are so many challenges in the world that we all have to face every day. Our approach has been kind of through the lens of does this cause harm? Is this an extremely divisive topic that's really going to disrupt the workplace? And if it is, maybe we don't want to go that route, that direction. An easy one could be politics. We don't want to touch that on our job site. We want everybody ultimately to be heard and seen and feel very much so included on our job sites. And so touching some of those polarizing topics would create a divide. So we don't want to do that.
It's always through the lens of, does this cause harm or division, or can it possibly help and improve? And if the answer is yes, that it can help and improve, maybe not everybody but some, then it's worth doing. So we try it on and we put it out. And every time we have these topics or we have these demonstrations, maybe not everybody's fully bought in, but when we affect even just one person, it's meaningful and it's impactful. So we continue to take that approach, even though the reaction could be mixed at times, it's still the right thing to do. So we move forward with it.
And how did we get there? Somewhat slowly. You know, 2010 with Safety Week, it’s an opportunity every year for folks that are really engaged and passionate about a certain topic to really do the research, create the learning moment, and we collectively try to find the best opportunity to push those learning moments out. It could be in a small group, in an office setting, could be a company-wide communication or learning. There’s a lot of different ways that we can get that. And so it depends on the individual that's passionate about a certain topic, but we don't put any governors or limiters on what they want to share.
And oftentimes those topics that arise out of Safety Week really do transcend throughout the years to topics like substance use, opioids, mental health, suicide prevention and awareness. Those are real big ones that have jumped to the top of the list of passionate individuals that say this isn't just something we should be talking about during Safety Week or Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month or Construction Suicide Prevention Awareness Week. We need to really span these throughout the year and try to make a difference.
AS: Looking at the progress of the program, what best practices would you offer to other companies? And also, can you include the communication aspect of this type of program?
SC: Again, when we think about health and safety, we shouldn't be narrow-minded. The opportunities that the EHS professional has to really influence positive outcomes in lives, which absolutely do show up for a positive business case, are really exponential. The things that we touch, policies, the programs that we create, they're all meaningful and they're all purposeful that we're trying to make sure that people leave the same way that they come in. And in our case, at Shawmut, basically we try to take that up a notch where they leave a little bit better than how they arrived. And what that means is that they're more educated. They had a good experience. They’re leaving with positive thoughts and feelings, and they're taking that back into their communities and into their families. And it really can be impactful when you take that approach.
So the EHS professional historically has done that. And oftentimes we’ve been siloed into thinking that this is a limiter to what happens within the confines of the day and really around making sure that people just remain safe. That’s not good enough. There are too many things that we as individuals come to work with every day that could start our day off negatively and could impact the outcomes of the day for ourselves or others through decision making, through bad attitudes. It's really contagious. So the EHS professional has to influence the organization to think about safety differently, more broadly, to include all these different elements, to partner with the right people within and outside of their organization.
The EHS professional has to have a great understanding of a lot of different topics, but do we master any one in particular? Not really. And so we have to leverage our relationships with HR, with marketing from certainly an understanding perspective, but a communication perspective, with experts in the field of a variety of different types. So we gather all of this information together. We put together these, I would say, cross-functional teams so that we can collaborate together. And then we, again, for the communication piece, work with our marketing teams to find a way to get that out to the biggest audience possible. That’s what really makes the difference here. If we stick within our silos, again, as an EHS professional, do we know how to reach a wide audience? Maybe, we can certainly talk to the folks on our job sites in the workplace. We can talk to our leadership team within the organization. But the average person needs to hear a message several times. Some would say up to 8 times for it to really just start to sink in. So are we delivering that message the right way, one time, two times, three times? There has to be different ways to do that. So we have to leverage our expertise within our marketing teams as well.
AS: Let's talk about your opioid program. What were the results and looking forward, can this be a blueprint to deal with other substance abuse issues that might occur in the future?
SC: I love to talk about this. So again, opening the door to new ideas in 2010 through Safety Weeks pushed us to a point in 2017 as we were thinking about Safety Week for 2018. We spent about a year almost, planning each week. And in that year, we started learning about this opioid epidemic that had been going on for some time. We didn't hear it through the traditional channels within the construction safety world. We had been introduced to a person called Michael Botticelli. He had an office near our Boston office. We were connected, and he started to really educate me on how big of a problem opioids are in America, and specifically in construction.
So over the year, we had been talking. He had been educating me and a few others. We had brought him in to be our keynote speaker for Safety Week, and I was somewhat prepared for a little bit of feedback around, wow, this is a unique topic. I didn't know. And maybe it dies there. And that didn't happen. When Michael got done talking, we had an outpouring of people that reached out saying, I had no idea, but I want to do something. How do we help influence this positively moving forward? Truthfully, I wasn't prepared for that. We had so many volunteers, we had to do something with it. We weren't just going to let it lie. So we created an opioid task force. This was a very large cross-functional team that included HR. And as soon as our insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield, learned about this, they said they wanted to be part of this program as well, because not many people were doing enough in this space in construction.
We hadn't had a known experience on our jobs, but we knew the statistics that were out there that opioids were really significantly plaguing this country. Substance use is a major problem. And in construction, it's hit hard for a variety of different reasons. But we just knew that the numbers were there and we had to focus on this.
So we formed the opioid task force, including our insurance carrier. They stepped in right away and they said, we would love to create a pilot program on the job site where we will issue Narcan toolkits and training. I think they chose 50 projects to start. So they came in, they conducted substance use, disorder training, overdose, emergency response, and how to identify and then use the Narcan. We ended up deploying that out to 50 job sites. We trained members on every job site. And then over the next year and a half, we trained all of our superintendents, about 300 superintendents, to run all of our projects across the country. They were all trained and issued Narcan to bring back to their job sites.
The awareness campaign continues. We continue to talk about this, get out with Michael and others and really talk about the problem and the solutions.
You asked about a blueprint. We created one back in 2018 because we realized that other people needed a jumping off point. And so we created this blueprint. It's one page, pretty simple document. Understand the problem, understand your resources, access them, create some learnings, and deploy Narcan or Naloxone out in the workplace with trained staff to respond.
The awareness continues today. We had a leadership development program in Boston the last couple of days. Yesterday’s safety moment was on overdoses and opioids. We didn't sunset this work. There's the hope that we can someday, but clearly we can't right now. It's still a problem. It's still hitting the news. There are still too many people affected negatively with opioids, whether leading to substance use, or worse, leading to death. And so we continue the conversation routinely throughout the year. All of our job sites are still equipped with Narcan, still have the training going on, still have the awareness campaigns, trying to get ahead of this problem as much as we can.
AS: Looking to mental health, tangential perhaps to why we have an opioid crisis, but looking at mental health and the focus generally across all industries, I know your company is focusing on that. Can you talk about what you're thinking in that area and what you're going to be doing in that area?
SC: What's interesting, again, with these cross-functional teams that have been formed for a variety of different reasons at this point, our safety steering committee or Safety Week planning committees, opioid task force, we continue to explore what's holding us back from greatness as human beings. The opioid epidemic and the work that we put in place that continues through today really started us as an organization and as people to think a little bit more broadly. We had a good idea on it through our Safety Weeks, and oftentimes the ideas were around yoga and fatigue management.
This started pushing the envelope a little bit more into something that's really, really personal, and so we started thinking differently and we started to learn about mental health shortly after the opioids. And again, is mental health a precursor to people needing to find an outlet in leading to the opioid crisis? Perhaps, absolutely.
So we started talking a lot about mental health as a whole, as a broad topic. The executive leadership team at Shawmut had an expert come in, talk about suicide awareness, train us up in recognition and some general tips. We learned that some numbers on the high side could say that 83% of people working in construction could suffer from some level of mental health any single day. Now, that may not be severe anxiety or depression, but it could be lower levels of it.
And so when you think about that, as a human race, we're not always feeling our best. So mental health became a real topic that we started to share more broadly. Research on more intentionally led us down the path of learning around just how much that could affect our performance as humans every day. And the statistics around extreme cases of mental health leading to death by suicide were really astonishing to us as a group of folks kind of working on this and learning and exploring, which led us to start the conversation around suicide prevention and awareness and bring in some more guest speakers to start opening this conversation up much more broadly than we ever had before.
AS: To follow up on your last point. You use partners for your opioid program. Are you finding in the industry mental health partners, or is everybody just kind of in the beginning stages of figuring out how to deal with this? What resources can companies look to?
SC: The union workforce has a lot of resources out there. So they've got experts that they lean on. There are private organizations for and not-for-profit that can support any organization in this journey. Many of them will specify in maybe opioid, substance use, maybe suicide prevention, training and awareness. There's a lot of different organizations out there that can help. A quick Google search will give you a lot of different ideas. So yes, we partnered a lot with Blue Cross and a few other partners for opioids and we tend to do the same with suicide and mental health.
AS: Okay, and then one final question. If a company is just at the beginning of their journey, if they haven't really gone through some of the programs that you have before, what advice would you give them to start? Would it be to do a survey of what's going on, small focus groups? Would it be training champions? What do you think is the best way for someone to start?
SC: That's a great question. And I do like some of the tips that you just said. Can you do a survey? Many do. Many, many organizations do. They'll reach their employees. If they have contract employees, they'll try to reach them as well to understand how people are feeling on their sites. I think there's obvious value to that, to understanding how people are feeling while employed or on work locations that you have control over.
I also don't think it's totally necessary. I am a real big believer in taking little steps to achieve a greater goal. The ultimate goal would be that we completely eliminate opioid-related fatalities in America, that mental health [problems] get significantly reduced, that suicide rates drop as close to 0 as they possibly can.
How can that happen? Well, there's a million steps that need to lead us to those results. There's not one giant leap. So every organization has to just understand that every day we as human beings are coming to work with some sort of baggage. It could have been carryover from the previous day at work. It could have been frustration from traffic, driving into work that morning. It could have been an argument that we had with our spouse, child, parent, or bad news. There's something that potentially could throw us off every single day. And it's as simple as that. And so if we understand that every day, we as humans are going to show up maybe a little bit differently, maybe a little bit off, hopefully great.
But if we understand that, then how can we take some steps to assist? And it has to be understanding the total person, we as human beings, the total person showing up and communicating in a different way. Work is important that we produce safely, efficiently, with high quality in whatever tasks that we're asked to do. But it's not just following the rules to do that or the plan to do that. We have to communicate that we understand mental health, that we could be struggling. Can we do some breathing exercises? Can we be more prepared to work, to share in a communication of a lesson learned that has impacted our community. A lot of different ways to start. Understand that people are coming to work uniquely every day and be prepared to support them so that when they leave, maybe they can leave a little bit better than they arrived. And that transcends to their families, to their communities. And when they come back to work, they can be even better for you.
We've got these programs that we really stood up with a few competitors in the state of Rhode Island called We've Got Your Back. We've got a huge resource there. We've got over 100 people trained up as peers on job sites throughout the state of Rhode Island. We brought that to Massachusetts and Connecticut. We wrote a memorandum of understanding so the industry would understand what we're trying to do. We've got 75 signatures on it in Rhode Island, Connecticut in May, signed it with the state, Massachusetts, now we're partnered with the Mass Building Trades Recovery Council.
Shawmut is the first project to bring in peer training on the job. We've got 10 trained peers, signage on the sites and hard hat stickers for every trained representative. So they're trained in suicide, mental health, opioid, so really anything that you could be struggling with that day, they can find somebody and go have a private talk. Vimeo Construction is next, then it's followed by Turner.
And we're partnering with five of the largest general contractors in the country to look at this program more deeply, to work with American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, use them as a resource to launch this and push this across the country. So we have a ton of stuff in the works for, I would say, for suicide, but mental health as a whole. And it's up and running for now three years in Rhode Island and proven that it's working.
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
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About the Author
Adrienne Selko
Adrienne Selko is senior editor at EHS Today and Material Handling & Logistics. Previously, she was in corporate communications at a medical manufacturing company as well as a large regional bank. Adrienne received a bachelor’s of business administration from the University of Michigan.