EHS excellence is an outcome of an enterprise that clearly values and cares for its employees and includes safety as a strategic element of its organizational culture. One of the most important aspects of a healthy company culture is effective leadership. Leaders who support their employees and care about their success can help improve their employee’s confidence, clearly define expectations, and cultivate a sense of community among their teams. These in turn support their company’s long-term goals, industry reputation and employee engagement. In other words, a successful safety and health professional must be aligned with her or his corporate culture and values. Recent events have impacted corporate values. A world-changing pandemic, competition for labor, technological investment have all entrenched health and safety as a value and extended its roots more deeply in corporate culture. EHS professionals have new leadership opportunities in these new value systems. They can connect with and leverage people, public trust and profits and embrace transformational EHS leadership and increase their influence. This session will introduce the concept of transformational safety leadership (TSL), explain how critical TSL is in engaging the workforce, establish the linkage between TSL and achieving EHS excellence, and present specific performance characteristics that drive TSL. It will then explore how to understand your corporate culture and values, how to introduce TSL into the organization, and how to align TSL with the corporate culture to achieve EHS excellence.

Key takeaways:

• What goes into transformational safety leadership and how it drives worker engagement and EHS excellence.

• How safety professionals can integrate EHS into their organizational cultures and leverage corporate momentum.

• The lost opportunities that result from EHS leadership vacuums.

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) have been a source of frustration for safety professionals, HR, operations managers and risk managers for many years. The definition of an MSD injury is so broad that it really encompasses most of the human movement systems—and if you can’t move, you can’t work! This presentation will flip the paradigm and present a working model that encompasses culture change, fatigue management, injury risk reduction, habit change and ergonomic solutions. Employees are shaped by the culture of the company, from date of hire through their work life cycle. To best prepare employees to meet or exceed the physical expectations of the job, training in best known methods and correct body mechanics can set the tone for how employees view safety. Employees can learn to take personal accountability for their well-being and help improve safety culture through flexibility with a purpose and objective feedback, diligent early management of symptoms and options for productive work. The net results are reduced MSD incidents, fewer OSHA recordable cases and less lost time. By supplementing or improving programs that might already be in place, a cohesive and standardized system can create the results that impact your site KPIs. Sounds too good to be true? Then attend this presentation and find out how intersecting culture change with MSD injury prevention can contribute to the overall financial health and safety of your company.

After having investigated and reviewed many fatalities, we will cover the relationship between organizational decision-making and fatality risk. The discussion will include how imbalanced decisions create fatality risk. We will use actual stories of fatalities as examples. Participants will learn: a. How imbalanced decisions create excessive risk and fatalities b. The reasons for imbalanced decisions

Like many, Greg Pass stumbled into safety by way of another career. He had been in the industry for about a decade when the unthinkable happened: an employee was killed on the job. After he knocked on the door to deliver the news to the young man's parents, he made a promise to himself to never do that again. That tragic accident changed Greg's perspective on safety. Greg has made it his mission to never lose another employee, and it's a promise he has kept. Still, not a day has gone by that Greg doesn't think about the young man, or his family's lawyer who said "You helped kill this boy" during a deposition. Greg rarely talks about that event, but he acknowledges that an important part of keeping workers safe today and tomorrow is to talk about--and learn from--our past experiences.

Guidance for companies on what to do when OSHA investigates, including a step-by-step discussion of an initial visit from OSHA, the OSHA inspection, walkaround issues, Fourth Amendment concerns, document and interview requests, OSHA's burden of proof to sustain a citation if issued, and balancing cooperation with protecting the employer's rights.

OSHA citations can be expensive but often the cost of litigation, even if successful, exceeds the cost of the penalties. However, businesses should be aware that OSHA citations and OSHA's investigative file are frequently used as damaging evidence in collateral litigation such as third party claims and/or to escape workers' compensation particularly when a fatality or serious injury is involved. Such collateral litigation almost always exposes businesses to significantly greater damages such as punitive damages in tort claims arising from the injury. Accordingly, businesses must be careful to understand how an OSHA settlement, e.g., classification of penalty, alleged violation description, exculpatory clauses and abatement of cited conditions can affect such litigation before settling OSHA citations and what settlement terms may help alleviate these concerns. This presentation will discuss these considerations and also explore related OSHA litigation and settlement issues such as protecting confidential and trade secret documents submitted to OSHA from public disclosure, limiting supervisory admissions, impact of citations on operations, and likelihood of repeat and willful citations after settling citations particularly for multi-facility organizations.

An accurate chemical inventory containing safety data sheets on all hazardous substances drives several other EHS programs. This includes ensuring first aid kits have the proper materials in them; spill response measures; handling and storage directions; exposure controls and proper personal protective equipment (PPE); physical and chemical properties that support the possible need for an eyewash station; determining which chemicals are incompatible with each other; disposal considerations for chemical spills; DOT information that identifies its DOT shipping class; and regulatory information that supports EPCRA Section 302, 312 and 313 reporting requirements. This session will examine what happened when a company had an inadequate hazard communication program that resulted in improper mixing of chemicals that created a lethal toxic gas, killing one and injuring 13 others. Attendees will learn why it’s essential to conduct value-added hazard communication training, have an accurate chemical inventory and know the hazards those chemicals present.

In this session, safety leaders from Chesapeake Utilities Corp. will discuss why in 2022 their senior leadership team dedicated significant resources towards enhancing an already strong safety culture. The discussion will cover the impetus that prompted these changes: 1) a multi-year business transformation initiative in 2019 focused on continued growth and increased operational efficiency through simplification, standardization, collaboration and automation 2) recommendations from a 2021 third-party gap analysis review related to the requirements and recommendations for Pipeline Safety Management Systems and Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems 3) the SEC's proposal to enhance and standardize climate-related disclosures for investors, as part of a growing awareness of the importance of environmental, social & governance (ESG) issues among public companies. The discussion will cover the senior leadership team’s decision to form an Enterprise Health and Safety Team (EHS), under the leadership of Risk Management, along with the consolidation of Operations Safety and Damage Prevention aligned under one director. The session will cover how the two teams are currently working together. The team will dive into current and completed initiatives while sharing individual perspectives on challenges (people vs. process), “aha moments”, lessons learned, the importance of project governance and change management, and next steps.

Responding to incidents is a critical capability for any organization. Caring for those impacted, restoring or modifying equipment that is involved, and returning to normal operation is important. Learning from any incident offers the opportunity to make the changes necessary that will prevent the incident from occurring again. But in addition to being capable in our response, it is even more important that we are proactive in preventing incidents from occurring in the first place. This presentation focuses on what being proactive really means and how seeing the reality of our environment and work that our people do is key to taking the actions necessary in advance of an incident occurring. We will examine how being visually literate helps us to see hazards in the workplace that have become so familiar we no longer see them - until the incident occurs. We will discuss the linkage between visual literacy and common safety processes including hazard recognition, prevention through design, serious injury and fatality prevention, and others.

Safety is filled with an alphabet soup (RIR, DART, OSHA, ROI, etc.) that can confuse and lose your audience. This presentation will explore the different approaches to conversations, trainings, and written form to ensure you maximize your ability to effectively communicate with your audience. The boots-on-the-ground worker won’t be blown away by capital investment talks with a return on investment of 20%, but you’ll certainly need to speak with Finance and Accounting to get approvals for projects. Operations Leadership understands how efficiencies can impact production metrics, so explaining how incidents and injuries negatively affect them will boost your ability to get things done. Safety messaging is simple, but complicated. Being able to identify the motivations for your audience will allow you to craft your message to gain an advantage -- in safety and in financial performance. Safety professionals all want to be at the same place, a safe work environment. If our messaging is not tailored to the audience, we take a detour to our destination.