Hi everyone; it’s Kevin. Today is Friday March 24th (date recorded). Everybody hears from me that safety is our number-one priority, and I mean it, and I like to live that mantra personally. Your safety really does matter to me on a personal level, and I know your safety and that of your fellow shipbuilders should and does matter to each of you. Every day I ask whether we’re doing enough to prevent injuries, and I don’t think that answer is ever affirmed yes. I think there’s always more that we can do, and while we continue to make strides in improving our safety performance, we’re not yet at our goal, which is zero injuries every year.
So I want to talk about that, and joining me on the podcast is Dan Vieira, Electric Boat’s Director of Environmental, Health and Safety. Today we’re going to talk about the concept of 200% accountability, the safety challenges that come with the historic growth that we’re currently undergoing and how we’re progressing towards a total safety culture. So Dan, welcome to the podcast. Let’s start with a little bit of your background.
Thanks for having me Kevin. I’m honored to be here and have a chance to talk about our safety program. As you know, it’s a new world for me here, coming out of the Operations world. We have a great team of Environmental and Safety professionals that care about the safety of our people and the health of the environment. I started at EB as an engineer in 2003, I entered the career development program in 2004. I’ve really been blessed to have a lot of great mentors in my career. I’ve worked with incredible people on an incredible product, and I find myself in a position now where I’m trying to become the teacher in a lot of cases and help people learn a lot of the things I’ve learned.
Safety, as important as it is to me, means that you’re in my office quite a bit. You and I talk about safety all the time. Sometimes those are good conversations; sometimes they’re a little difficult. But we’ve certainly talked about 200% accountability, and I think by now many people on the EB team know about it. I know in this business as we add new people every single day, we can’t assume that everybody has gotten the word. So let’s talk about 200% accountability. Let’s talk about what that means to you and how that affects how we interact with each other when we see someone doing something unsafe.
I’ll talk about the obvious stuff first: be aware, identify hazards, communicate, work with your peers and take action to correct unsat conditions.
You were alluding to the uncomfortable confrontations that should take place; it’s not comfortable for people when they see somebody doing something incorrectly and operationalizing that, I mean that to say, saying something like “Hey Kevin, I see what you’re doing over there. I’m really worried about your safety.” You got a second to talk and think about what you’re doing” Recognizing that people are always going to be defensive. It’s everybody’s first reaction to fire back and defend themselves. Teaching our people to not get distracted or intimidated by that, but to just keep it professional, keep it in a comfortable place: “Hey, I’m just looking out for you, I just want you to think about what you’re doing” and de-escalate those uncomfortable moments. A lot of times, after the fact, the person doing the wrong thing will be appreciative that someone took the time, went out of their way and advocated for that person’s safety.
There are some rare cases where someone is doing something really unsafe and people have to elevate it and get their supervisor involved or ask for help. Those are certainly the minority of the cases, but you never know when that unsafe act is going to hurt that person or even hurt someone who is not involved in what’s going on and leave a problem for someone else to run into. So it’s really important that people speak up in a professional and respectful way, but don’t just let things happen—intervene.
Absolutely agree with that. It’s about your own safety too; if you see somebody doing something wrong near you and you don’t take the action to correct it, not only may they injure themselves, but they could also injure you. Think about the stuff we do on a daily basis: we’ve got high-pressure systems, high-pressure fluids, whether that’s steam systems or hydraulic systems, for example. We work with electricity, we do a lot of hot work that involves sparks and flames. There’s a lot that can hurt people, and if they’re willing to take that risk for themselves, that could spill back on you. It’s in your own best interests to make sure you’re being as professional as you can by correcting that behavior anytime you see that.
Can I take a second to tell you a story I experienced? We were in Hi-bay (Quonset Point). A team had gone two years without an injury doing the kind of work you’re talking about—heavy steel, hot work. They got together and we discussed how they went two years without an injury. I was nervous…I said, hey guys, congratulations, but I’m nervous…if you have an injury, what happens after that? A guy in the back laughed, and he said “Dan, we’ve already had an injury. That was two years ago, we’ve put together a second string of two years without an injury.” I asked how they did it. He said, “We look out for one another.” And I said, you mean 200% accountability and he said, “No in our crew it’s a 1,000% accountability. We all look out for one another, and we all treat each other like a family and we help each other and keep each other safe. I thought that was great proof that 200% accountability does work.
That’s a great story; I appreciate you sharing that. One of the things that we’re going through right now is historic growth; we’re hiring new people every day. Shipbuilding is not a natural act. People don’t just come into the fence line here at EB and know what a safe environment looks like. We’ve got to do a lot to help people understand what the right safety practices and habits are that will keep them safe over a career. There’s a clear correlation between injury rates and time in service, and we’re taking a lot of data and showing that’s certainly an effect here at Electric Boat. Let’s talk about what we’re seeing and how we’re helping new employees adopt the right habits as soon as they can.
In 2022, 22% of our people have less than one-year experience, and they make up 29% of EB’s injuries. It’s important that we look through their eyes. That’s hard to do when you have five, 10, 15 years’ experience. One of the things that helps me look back through their eyes, when I first started here at Electric Boat, I heard about these “RAM” moves all the time from the nukes. And I thought to myself, being an engineer, wow, this must be a really big piston, these guys talk about moving this “RAM” all the time. I had no idea that stood for “radioactive material.” All of our new folks, that’s the lens they come in with, and we forget that.
It’s very clear with new hires, in 20% of their injuries, they hurt their hands, in another 20%, they’re hurting their eyes. We need to leverage the power of 19,000 people and come up with creative, new ways and old-school ways, in any combination, however we can get the message across that our young people need to protect their hands and protect their eyes. There is a lot of teaching that we need to do to make up for the inexperience.
In fact, this week, you and I had a discussion…eye injuries, for example, is always something I’ve been interested in. If you’re a trade worker here in a shipyard, how you make your money is all about the goodness of your hands, eyes and brain. Think about how incapacitated you would be to earn a living, if you didn’t have a good set of hands and eyes to conduct your work every day. That’s important, and I think people need to appreciate that. In my own experience walking around the yard, the thing I see people taking risks with more often than not, handling wood, handling Band-It when they’re strapping stuff down, they’re not protecting their hands with gloves. We’ve got to get that habit into our new folks as quickly as possible.
Another area that is an issue for us is to and from injuries, I think it’s about 30% of our injuries are related to to-from.
Yes, 30% of our lost-work injuries are to-from injuries, people going to and from the job. It feels like that’s something we can absolutely fix. I’ll run through the list:
- Don’t go off-roading—don’t climb through staging, lines and leads.
- Make sure your lighting is good.
- Focus on walking. Walking is working.
- Stairs and ladders are my pet peeve. Stairs: use the handrail; it’s a safety device. If you’re worried about the germs, don’t touch it, just keep your hand within an inch or so. But be ready to grab the rail when you need it.
- Ladders—two free hands. We have so many of our folks getting hurt going up and down ladders. You’ve got to use two free hands.
- The simple stuff—don’t walk and text.
I see a lot of that, walking and texting. Every time I have an opportunity to stop somebody, I just ask them not to do that. I don’t want to have them trip and fall.
Ear buds and head phones—I see a lot of that. I confront people on that. They don’t understand that taking away your ability to hear is taking away your early-warning system. We have a lot of large vehicles that operate through this shipyard, and people need to be able to hear that vehicle coming their way and get out of the way in the unlikely event that something goes wrong. You need to be able to hear and communicate with your fellow workers.
I think some of our more senior shipbuilders over the years have had some hearing impact based on the lack of hearing protection that was part of our culture many, many years ago. You’ve got 35-year, 40-year professionals with hearing loss over their career. What I worry about with our young people with earbuds, in particular, is now they can pipe noise straight into their brain, and I worry about the impact on their hearing, not from work-related stuff, but from music. So I think you’ve got to take that into account; make sure you’re protecting your hearing as well because you’re going to miss it when it’s gone.
I think we can all relate to getting distracted, maybe thinking about the next thing on our to-do list, maybe that’s in the yard or in life outside the yard and then we lose awareness of our surroundings, so some good basic reminders there about to and from injuries.
We’re doing some work now with ASIGs, Area Safety Implementation Groups, within the departments in Operations. This is a great opportunity for us to engage with people at every level in the organization to get them focused on safety. So let’s talk a little bit about these ASIGs.
It’s a really simple concept, every Operations department is doing it. Simply getting together, the requirement is every other week, in practice most departments do it every week. It’s required to have the hourly folks involved, supervisors, second-level supervisors, the third level, the managers are often involved. It’s a matter of having a written safety plan, talking about the issues, taking action to solve the issues and then following through and demonstrating our commitment to safety through engagement and action, not just talk, action. Listen to the people and solve the problems.
Yeah, you can’t manage your way through safety. You need to have engagement from the folks who are doing the actual work on a routine basis, and making sure you’re capturing their thought process. So to that end, we talked a little bit about this in the beginning, about our total safety culture. The total safety culture road map outlines a steady progression that takes us from a point where we are ad-hoc in the way we do safety to the point where safety ultimately becomes something that we do every day just by habit. So let’s talk about the actions and mindsets we need to obtain as we move through and reach our goal of becoming the safest shipyard in the world.
There are six lanes of effort:
- Management Commitment – we need to lead.
- Employee Engagement – we need employees engaged to solve any of the problems. That’s what the ASIGs are a big aid toward.
- Training and Education, especially for new hires. We’re trying to make up for inexperience by training them and educating them on how to be safe.
- Cleanliness and Organization – a clean and organized space is a safe space(5S).
- Personal Protective Equipment – no one will ever say, “Kevin, today is your day that you really need to wear your PPE.” You either have it on or you don’t. When that moment comes, the expectation is that we’re wearing our PPE and it protects us from the hazard.
- Design Strategy – our process improvements leverage a lot of that. I was in a great process improvement presentation over in 915 yesterday. They talked a lot about boring bar and getting it in at the right time in sequence of work, and by doing that they’re not in a heavily populated area, and there’s protection in that.
- Progression through the lanes:
- It starts with initial effort, then awareness, mid-stream, level three, is understanding what I need to do to keep myself safe. In my mind, level four, commitment, is the hardest to achieve. Teaching people to understand the value of why we do things the way we do to keep them safe. Convincing them to live, breathe and sleep safety. I think level five, habit, is nothing more than level four, commitment, sustained over time.
I’m looking forward to when we’ve achieved level five; it will be a great day.
It will be. But, I’ve got some experience with the Total Safety Culture and the roadmap from my time at NASSCO. We never achieved level five, and I don’t know that we ever will, especially in an environment where we are bringing new people into the business almost every day. We’re constantly going to be in a position where we have to reinforce those first couple of levels and getting into awareness and understanding and making sure that people understand this on a routine basis. So constantly reinforcing that foundation is going to be key to us.
I am proud of the work that we’re doing here. Three years in a row we’ve set new records from a safety performance perspective in recordable and lost-work injury rates. We’re off to a good start this year. I think we’re all pleasantly surprised by that. So I think sustained effort in safety is really driving that performance. I’m serious when I talk about driving us to be the best and safest shipyard in the world.
Dan, thanks for joining me. I want to make sure that everybody understands safety is important to me, I’m passionate about it. It has a personal importance to me. I want to make sure everybody goes home in the same condition that we come to work because it’s the people we come home to that are the most important thing in the world. We want to make sure that we can live life to the fullest with them.
Please everyone, be accountable to yourself and your EB teammates. If you see something that isn’t right, take the time to say something and stay safe.
Thanks everyone; we’ll talk again soon.
