Jill:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro live at the 2019 National Safety Congress and Expo in beautiful San Diego. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer and today I'm joined by Tom Andrzejewski, who is the Safety Director with Hunt Electric Corporation.

Tom:

Thanks Jill.

Jill:

I got past the hardest part, which.

Tom:

Pronouncing my name?

Jill:

Yeah, your name pronunciation. And I thought I had it, but I sort of stumbled, did I do okay?

Tom:

You nailed it, it was great.

Jill:

Anderjevsky, got it. Now I'm going to be saying it in my dreams probably. Welcome to the podcast.

Tom:

Thanks.

Jill:

I'm so happy to have you here. As a fellow Minnesotan, thanks for coming all the way to San Diego so that you and I could talk to one another.

Tom:

I don't know if we want to actually discuss how I became the Accidental Safety Pro's accidental.

Jill:

Accidental podcast.

Tom:

Podcast guest?

Jill:

I think we should because this is, you were the last minute booking.

Tom:

We were at the gate together and I just said, "Hi". You said, "Hey, what are you doing at whatever time it is right now?" I said, "Well, what do you want to do?" And here we are.

Jill:

So, Tom and I know one another a little bit from our shared safety histories. Our paths cross once in a while and they crossed again this week at the airport. I'm like, Tom, I don't have Tom's story. So I'm so happy to have you here. Thanks for coming all the way on the plane with me to San Diego accidentally and here we are to share a story.

Tom, as you are familiar with the podcast, The Accidental Safety Pro is a pun, to talk about how did the safety field find you, or how did you find it. So how many years have you been at this game?

Tom:

I've been doing this for 36 years now and I think particularly back then, people did find the field accidentally. I mean I'm really pleased that currently there's some younger folks that work for me now that they specifically went for a degree program to qualify and to do the work, but I'm not sure how much that existed 36 years ago. What I actually was, was a facilities engineer and I held that job, got a really great offer, worked for an aerospace company down in Eden Prairie. About a year after I joined them I got caught up in their first lay off ever, I still like to think that was last in, first out choosing and then when I re-entered the job market it was as a field engineer for American Mutual.

At the time American Mutual was the only company that wrote unsupported worker's compensation, which only means that they didn't write any other lines, or maybe they were one of the only companies that would write work comp without anything else, in Minnesota and got some great training by a great group of guys and I would consider one of my safety mentors Mike Hannafin. From there, did that for a few years and really got tired of going from doorstep to doorstep to all of the customers just trying to tweak or push them in the right direction and then being disappointed the next time I showed up that they really hadn't accomplished much or changed at all.

Jill:

So you were doing safety audits, or where you may be doing training with them and steering them in a direction like here's where your gaps are? Is what the job was?

Tom:

I think the job at that time was more of the eyes and ears of the underwriting department to assess the risk. I was probably 22 or 24 at the time, so I'm not sure I was the most credible guy to come in and do training for the groups, and quite frankly, I didn't do it much. But, had enough of a knowledge base to assess whether they were a good risk or not. It was a pretty heady job for a young kid because you could make a recommendation that would either make them a non-renewal candidate, or if they were really awful, and that rarely occurred, you could actually cancel their policy.

Jill:

Sure, and you were impacting their premiums too based on, I suppose, the assessments you were doing?

Tom:

Yeah. In the long view for sure.

Jill:

That was your foray into safety. Working in Worker's Compensation and insurance.

Tom:

Yeah, and it was an excellent company. They did a lot of development with us. It was the basis of all my safety knowledge.

Jill:

I bet you learned a lot about hazard recognition skills just having gone, like you said, so many doors that you went through, so many places that you went, you saw a lot.

Tom:

Sure. Metal fabricating and just a variety of exposures. It's true now, I'm jumping ahead to my current position, but with the variety of clients that we have, get exposed to a lot of different operations. That's cool. After doing that for a couple years and getting frustrated with the inability to impact much of a change, went to [inaudible 00:05:40] Food Stores and stayed there until they were purchased by Super Value.

Jill:

I remember that.

Tom:

Then spent the next segment of my career as Safety Director for Waldorf Corporation, which was a legacy of the Hoerner Waldorf organization and eventually, they still make paper down in the midway area of St. Paul.

Jill:

Wow, that's a lot. From a grocery store to a paper mill, that's a lot of different hazards. That's interesting.

Tom:

When you challenged me on that, you're right.

Jill:

It is. From a retail space and grocery does absolutely have legitimate hazards. Paper processing is certainly a different scope of hazards.

Tom:

Yeah. It's big heavy machinery and the potential for significant losses is pretty great. Live steam and heavy rotating equipment.

Jill:

Massive lock out tag out emphasis.

Tom:

But inherited some cool things from the Hoerner Waldorf legacy and did some cool things there and it was a good experience. A lot of printing operations there. Then I tried my hand at consulting for a while.

Jill:

Okay.

Tom:

I won't mention that company's name because in the end it was at a period of my life where I thought I could take on anything and part of my role was I had to remain chargeable, but I also had to recruit enough business and discovered maybe I'm not the world's greatest marketing person.

Jill:

I had that same discovery. One of my jobs was with, the shortest job I ever had in safety was working for a customized training department out of a technical college. I was to sell my safety services and deliver on training. I thought, well I love doing training, this is going to be easy. But when I figured out I had to drum up my own business, I'm quickly like, I don't think the sales life is for me. That's a talent set that I don't possess.

Tom:

I'm right there with you. For me, it was like two full-time jobs and I wasn't good at one of them, so it wasn't a really good fit. The only job I ever got by answering a newspaper ad was the current one with Hunt and that's made up, if you count years, it's made up the bulk of my safety career now. Really blessed to have fallen in with a company with really all the top management support you'd want, and I think even some of those managers would currently argue that fact, but the truth of the matter is, I hope I have a great reputation in the Twin City Safety and Healthy community and while part of that is hopefully my doing, part of it is, I feel bad for professionals who get in situations where they really don't have the support that they need to succeed. By and large I have at Hunt accomplished some really cool things.

Jill:

For people who aren't familiar with Hunt, when you hear electrical, people maybe think of lots of different things an electric corporation would do, but what's the 30000 foot view of what Hunt does?

Tom:

It's evolving.

Jill:

Okay.

Tom:

A large part, large commercial construction. You and I joked about it, when my friends know that I work for an electrical contractor and they want an outlet installed at their house, they go "Hey, could one of your guys come over?" And it's like no. It's not that kind of electrical contractor. We work on enterprise data centers and hospitals and we work for our local clients nationally and we also have a really strong group of national clients that we perform work for.

Jill:

So the bulk of our work is, if we're talking OSHA compliance for a second here, is it primarily construction, the construction safety, or do you cross into the general industry with the work your employees do as well?

Tom:

That's also evolving.

Jill:

Okay.

Tom:

The bulk of it was construction for years, but our service group has gotten larger and larger and those are the folks who might go to, our customer base is a bunch of Fortune 500 companies around the Twin Cities and the guys will show up in the job truck and those loan workers present some interesting challenges of their own, to say nothing of the vehicle hazards because I think our roads aren't getting any safer, they're getting worse and worse.

Jill:

So the scope of your work is broad by way of exposures that your employees can have and you said the company keeps evolving, so I'm guessing the safety department has evolved over time as well. When you started where you the loan safety person, then you grew a team or how did that part happen?

Tom:

I was the very first full-time safety person that Hunt had. I was proceeded by a project manager who held the role as a part-time title, but I was by myself for about nine years. Joined by Diana Nelson, I think nine or 10 years later and she's been an absolute rock star and an awesome partner. We've continued to add to staff and we've probably, I'm embarrassed to say I don't know the count off the top of my head, but probably 10 or 11 safety people working for us right now. A good portion of them working on a really large data project that we have going on in Nebraska. And really great young people too. It's been fun.

Jill:

Yes, you've had the opportunity to mentor people as your career has progressed.

Tom:

We try our best.

Jill:

Yeah. Sounds like an evolving career all these years Tom.

Tom:

It's been super fun and it's not over yet. We're doing some really cool things right now. The buzzword this week for some of your other guests were creating an actively caring environment. We have been engaged in working with a local PT firm that's been doing outstanding work for us.

Jill:

PT meaning physical therapy.

Tom:

Physical therapy, and it was born out of putting solar gardens together. Solar garden work is basically, a farmer gives up his, someone procures a muddy cornfield that's basically unfarmable from a farmer and they put up a one to five to sometimes even larger [inaudible 00:13:13] solar installation. It's highly repetitive work, we're really challenged our first season of solar work because we got hit up with a lot of strain injuries that we didn't anticipate and it was an issue, it was blowing up our TRR and engaged the service of, I'll give them a little bit of a shout out, On Site Solutions. They helped us in a number of ways.

Jill:

They're the physical therapy group.

Tom:

That's the physical therapy group. We did three things and I think two of them are avant garde. They helped us with a stretching program. They helped us with ergonomic risk assessment training for our field leadership, but some of the really cool things that we've done with them are, they'll go out and help us lead stretching in the morning, hang out on the job site for a little bit to see if anybody wants an individual consult for any aches or pains they may be having and then the super fun part is just walking the job site. It's so easy to catch somebody who is doing a little bit of a stretch that might indicate they're a little bit sore or something and just diving into that and saying, "Hey, what's going on there? Is there anything we can help?"

You can introduce the physical therapist and it's an early intervention model that's been really fun and it's been really grounding for me too because with all the stuff that we get involved in, sometimes you forget that you got involved in safety because you really like to help people. So it's been really grounding in that way for me. That's closing the loop to this whole actively caring theme that you guys have had going on the podcast.

Jill:

Right. Yeah, the partnership with physical therapy and safety, for anyone who's listening who is like, I haven't thought about that before, that could be a partnership or how would that work? I've done the same thing in previous jobs as well and it can be so powerful not only for you to learn as a safety professional, particularly on that ergonomic stuff like you were talking about, not only for you, but you said you cross-trained with your team as well to be able to identify things, but they can really be problem solvers and teachers to individuals as well.

I had contracted with a physical therapist in a previous job that was in the turkey industry, not in a meat packing setting, but in barns where employees were having to lift and handle and carry very large turkeys, repetitively. They were getting injuries like you might expect from shoulders and wrists and elbows. Because of some of the lifting and the things that they were doing with turkeys with regard to insemination and vaccination that kind of thing. Brought in a physical therapist to watch the mechanics of how people did work and they were able to say, "Hey, we can see we've got a shoulder impingement going on here every time you do this move with your elbow higher than your shoulder", and then explaining to the employees what does the inside of that structure look like and here's the stress that's happening when we're doing that particular movement. Then how could we modify the work and put them in different positions so we're not impinging the shoulder all the time and wrist angles and how can we change some of that stuff on how we were doing things.

Their eyes just bring a different set along with their background in training to be able to explain it not only to us, so that we can keep explaining it to people going forward, but to the employees too, to go "Oh, yeah I do have that pain in my neck, or I do have that pain in my shoulder", so that we can move around that, not only for them to understand, but them to then agree to try something different. I think that's really a powerful partnership with safety.

Tom:

I don't want to overstate, it's important that the safety team was part of that training, but I don't want to overstate that because what was really important was that our field leadership were there. I hope they're doing as much with that as I had hoped because they're the real process specialist. They've performed the work their whole lives, they've evolved to the point where they've been elevated in the organization so they're now supervising the work and so they're our process experts. To give them that knowledge base, hopefully will yield some significant improvements or allow them to consider some of the ergonomic aspects as they engage in new and different work and new and different methods of doing the work and it's what we're getting into now is process improvement in general and that's really important for safety to be a part of that.

Jill:

Yeah, absolutely. I know that when we've spoken in the past, you've talked about some, if we're going to go theory just for a second on safety, one of the people that you've paid attention to is Conklin and some of the theories on safety with that. Do you want to talk about how you've applied some of that knowledge with your path as it's evolved?

Tom:

It's disappointing to admit that I don't know if it's that I've applied it or that I wish to apply it. We talked about engaging with the physical therapists on site and all the great work that they're doing for us and it's had a really significant impact in reducing our TRR and I feel a lot of us as safety professionals get preoccupied with that all important lagging indicator. Everyone around here, at the safety show everyone is talking about leading indicators, but all the customers on qualifications and prequals and things like that, they want to know what those lagging indicator numbers are. There's a lot, I think there's a lot of pressure to reduce those numbers.

Our efforts with onsite have really helped in that regard, but the cautionary tale I have is that you can't lose sight of the serious hazards that your company faces. For us, that's always electrical. In fact, we had a pretty significant rounding incident which helped us regain that focus this summer and I can't get into that here, but that's what gets me into Conklin has some theories about work as imagined versus work as actually performed.

Jill:

Tell more about that, in case someone listening doesn't know about that.

Tom:

Work as imagined is just your corporate policy, your management directives, not necessarily just in safety, but certainly in safety and in all regards. It's how management states that they'd like the work performed and what their expectations are. In one of Todd's books, I can't quote it right now, he just talks about then there's work as discovered. Infrequently people are performing work as imagined and most often there's some variation, there's some adaptation they have to do and particularly for the electrical work we have to maintain our corporate standards, but I think what's informative about the concept of work as discovered is to make certain that we're providing the education that they need to protect themselves as they perform work that isn't as imagined by management and by safety.

Jill:

Yep, right. So that they can continue to keep themselves safe if things aren't following the linear path that we as safety professionals think it's supposed to be like this, because it's discovered as the work happens is the point.

Tom:

Well, and the theory is fascinating. I think it's a relatively simple theory, but in practice it touches on culture, it touches, you and I talked about the integrity of your process and your people and I got to be careful about how I state that because I think some Hunt people will be listening to this eventually. But it's just, does the organization have the integrity so that people can let safety and let management know, "I know you guys say do it this way, but this is what's really happening out in the field." Because if we don't know that's happening in the field, we can help them.

Jill:

Or add additional education.

Tom:

It's at all levels. The journeyman performing the work, just having, there's a variety of reasons that they don't want to tell their foreman, "Hey, this is unsafe, I don't want to do it." Because I think most of them perceive it as a means to the top of the lay off list and we don't tell them that, they internalize that. To me that's a type of integrity. Then, foreman to management or to the safety group, letting them know how it really is that we can really address how things really are. Management, and just the integrity of management and even safety management that you're not lying to yourself about how great you really are. We've been really fortunate that we've developed a really great reputation and I would safely say that safety has become part of Hunt' brand, but as the safety director I always have to caution people that I'm concerned that we're not as good as our reputation and we need to keep working that.

Jill:

I think that's an accurate thing for any safety professional to say. It's not like you work and arrive somewhere and then you're done. It's not like you've done all this work all these years at Hunt and now it's like, check, we're good, we're going to hit cruise. It doesn't work that way with safety. I think that's what you're getting at, is that it's evolving just like our professions and our occupation and our job path and everything else, and what you've done with the safety department that you have at Hunt. It's not, you haven't arrived and the work is finished. It's never done. How does that evolution continue as the company continues to grow and progress and the work changes and humanity changes and we get new employees in and how does that work? How do you keep your eye on the ball?

Tom:

And you have to appeal to a new, younger set. The generational differences.

Jill:

Yeah, different skill sets and understandings. I get what you're saying. When you're talking, essentially someone might call it culture. We might call it the culture of the safety at a particular company or location or with a group of individuals with their supervisor or something like that. How do you build what you're calling integrity so that people feel safe, top to bottom throughout the company to be able to speak their truth and to share with you so that you can be helpful.

Tom:

It's really part of culture and maybe integrity is the wrong way to look at it. Really, this grounding that I spoke of just has reinvigorated me that I think you have to be really diligent about a way to measure your culture and a willingness to take the steps to remediate your culture.

Jill:

How are you looking at doing that now? Is that what you're trying to discover?

Tom:

I think it's our next thing.

Jill:

Yeah.

Tom:

Kind of response to events of this summer that we have to understand where we're at. Fortunately, we're moving that direction in terms of engaging employees more and over, not just safety, but throughout the organization. Safety, quality, productivity, all the way around. I think moving forward the organization is going to be more receptive to it. That's the next big thing that I want to challenge the organization to do. We'll get together at some later date and I'll let you know how it goes.

Jill:

I know, isn't that fabulous? I mean it really is. That is the nature of safety. It is always, it's never stagnant. I think that's what keeps so many of us at this for so many years. A lot of people have a lot of jobs and professions for a long time, but I think safety people, when you talk with them, they're always talking about the next thing. They're not like, we're doing the same old thing. If you're interested in taking care of people, which by and large that's what our profession is, we care about people and humanity, we're always looking. We're always looking to improve things. In fact, that's one of the ways that you and I, our paths met across, we didn't know it, but our paths did cross at one point professionally. You can tell our audience a bit about an unintentional way that our paths crossed.

Tom:

The Minnesota OSHA Mobile Earth [inaudible 00:27:23] Standard, you mean.

Jill:

Yes. I co-authored this law back in, I think it was approved by the legislature in 1999, in the operation of mobile earth-moving equipment that I co-authored with my co-worker at the time, Norm, and it was in response to deaths that I was investigating when I was with OSHA. People being ran over by mobile earth-moving equipment, not in a roadway, but in other work setting. So, co-authored this law and many years later, Tom it was many years later, I was looking at the law again because I was writing a presentation about it and I was like, wait a minute, there's a new piece to this law. I don't remember writing this one little section to this piece, what happened to the law? And then you and I met somewhere.

Tom:

Yep.

Jill:

And it turns out you added that.

Tom:

Well, it was just a, I responded to a comment period and I said, hey we should address, you're going to require high visibility garments and we should address the fact that electricians, if they're engaged in electrical work, shouldn't be wearing a synthetic garment.

Jill:

Need to be fire rated.

Tom:

Basically it was language associated with, NFPA70E wasn't such a big thing back then, but it basically addressed the non-FR nature of a high visibility vest and that there should be an exception carved out for electricians and that got included in the law. I'm not sure I even knew that it was included in the law. I think I might have been as surprised as you were. I was reading OSHA rules one day and I was like, hey I wrote that.

Jill:

You did. Yeah. It's maybe a sentence and a half long.

Tom:

But it was mine.

Jill:

But it's there and it's yours. For anyone who is listening who is like, wait a minute, you can write safety laws? The answer is yes you can.

Tom:

Yes you can.

Jill:

Yes you can. And you can amend them as Tom did and it was a great amendment. Thank you for that addition. It was good.

Tom:

You and I were talking earlier about other, and you enjoyed that, that's part of our shared legacy, but another geeky safety guy legacy that I'm actually kind of proud of, in fact at the end of the week, we're going to be getting together with the Federated Electrical Contractor Group and it's basically an industry association of our own choosing.

Jill:

Here in San Diego.

Tom:

Here in San Diego and we get together a couple times a year for a few days just to benchmark on safety. Years ago, early in my years at Hunt, I had written this live work authorization form and we were just benchmarking on, what do your forms look like today and could everyone bring it. It was one of the agenda items. Bring a copy of your live work authorization so that we can just see what everybody is doing with this and how are you collecting the information you need to do the proper risk assessment for authorized live, energized work. Everybody started passing their forms around and a majority of the companies had basically a variant of the form that I had written. That's a really weird legacy of mine.

Jill:

In the way back.

Tom:

Yeah, that a lot of the large electrical contractors around the country are using some variant of a live work authorization form that I wrote.

Jill:

That's a cool legacy.

Tom:

Yeah, kind of.

Jill:

It is a cool legacy.

Tom:

Kind of geeky too.

Jill:

Well, hello, we are in the nerdom. It's for sure. You mentioned, you're part of this federated electrical group and that's a good thing to mention for other safety professionals who are maybe starting out and listening. Many of us belong to organization, we're here at NSC or we belong to AASP, we're part of BCSP, something like that. But then within industry groups there's safety things as well. This is one of them for you, are there others that you're part of too? That cross over in the industry for you?

Tom:

No, this is the main one for electrical and it's a really amazing group. We joke that it's benchmarking, but it's part therapy because we all deal with the same challenges. Part therapy, commiseration, and then benchmarking. Shared practices and within the group. It's large electrical contractors from all over the country, so we're by and large the safety leaders and so, if something happens or if a new process is developed, that's shared at those meetings so we can all benefit from it.

Jill:

Right.

Tom:

This is just a group of people that we would partner with as we perform work around the country and generally wouldn't compete with. Like I said, it's an industry association of our own choosing, but it's genesis wasn't based in safety. In fact, safety came in a little bit later. Actually I was one of, I think three safety professionals that made a pitch to the ownership group that safety people should be getting together a couple times a year and it's important for us to be benchmarking in this area.

Jill:

Yeah. For our listeners who are maybe starting out in their careers, be searching for those things and asking those questions.

Tom:

Or creating them.

Jill:

Exactly, or creating them. Or asking if an organization exists that safety should have a seat at that table like you said. I know that I was part of a US Poultry and Ag, which sounds funny, but safety committee for the nation and that was really specific to the group as well. I have another friend who I know is part of one for the Zoo and Aquarium industry that's specific to that. I have another friend who's part of an organization just for sugar beets. They're there. Think about what is it that my company does and is there a place that I can find like-minded people in safety specific to my industry. I think that's a good tip for people.

Tom:

I hope it still exists, but back in my pulp paper days, there was a Minnesota Pulp and Paper safety association and it was just all the safety directors for all the mills around Minnesota and primarily in northern Minnesota, I think I was the only one in the metro area. We visit each other's mills periodically and we'd take turns hosting meetings and benchmark.

Jill:

Yeah, so Tom since you've been at this a while, when you need to do your own research, where are the places that you normally go? For people who are listening who are, when you're trying to do your own continuing education or when you get stumped on something, obviously you can go to this group that you're talking about now with your cohorts, but are there other sources that you routinely go to?

Tom:

I'll be honest and I'll have to say I lean on some of the young geniuses that work in our safety department at Hunt. Two things happen and I'm always interested in how people solve problems. Networking is really important. It's important to understand how different organizations meet certain compliance or safety issues. But, I always want there to be a basis and a standard to make sure that we're meeting those requirements. Most of what we do, we just make sure that we have a sound basis and we're covering all the necessary requirements, but for a large part we've got a pretty talented group and we chart our own course. We check in with others and we network among other safety professionals not just among electrical contractors, but even in the Twin City Safety and Health Community, which I happen to think, Twin Cities Construction, Safety and Health Community is special. I could name a number of people and a number of really outstanding firms, general contractors and other trade partners that we keep each other sharp. It's not that we're infallible, but I think we have something special going in the upper mid west.

Jill:

Right. You've been talking about an evolution of career and an evolution of the way that you practice safety and I think you said it really well, you use the standards as that baseline because as we all know, that's the minimum. Then you take it to your team and you're like, okay if we've met the minimum, now how do we evolve this to be better than, right? And more protective and what's everybody else doing in the industry and how can we share and learn together. So important.

Before we wrap up our time today is there anything that you would like share with 36 years into it, do you have any sage pieces of advice?

Tom:

Did I offer that or did you come up with that?

Jill:

I came up with that.

Tom:

Okay, because I'm still learning too. No, the only thing about having done safety work for 36 years is I am particularly energized by actually everybody I work with. Diana would be really disappointed and I don't want to include her in the group of young people who work for us anymore and I'll probably hear about this for saying it, but I'm particularly energized by working with those guys, but occasionally I take a step back and I say, wow I've been doing safety work for longer than any of you have been alive.

Jill:

That's something.

Tom:

Even my mother, my mother is 94 years old and cantankerous as ever. When we talk about age we both, our fall back is, I don't know how this happened. Speaking of age, I don't know how this happened to me. I don't feel like an old person and like my mother says, she feels like an 18 year old trapped in this 94 year old body. She behaves that way too. So that's good.

Jill:

That's where you get it.

Tom:

Yeah, lets hope.

Jill:

That's awesome. Well, Tom thank you so much for sharing your career and your story and wise words with the audience today. I really appreciate it. Really, thank you for evolving the way you have to help Hunt be a leader as they are and continue to be in safety.

Tom:

Okay. And appreciate the invite to do this, this has been fun.

Jill:

Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you all for spending your time listening today and more importantly, thank you for your contribution. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe everyday. If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our episodes, follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro community group on Facebook. If you aren't subscribed and you'd like to hear past or future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple podcast app or any podcast player that you like. You can also find all the episodes at vividlearningsystems.com/podcast.

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