The Birth of the GENERATIVE SAFETY CULTURE By / Natalie Bruckner • Photos courtesy of Local 71 Business Manager, Paul Crist Safety in the sheet metal workers’ space is going through a fascinating transformation. Where safety was once considered a matter of compliance and processes, today it is evolving into a positive value system that engages people at all levels. This new approach is called a generative safety culture. Simply put, this paradigm shift is about moving safety from a finger-pointing blame game to a system where everyone gets involved and looks out for themselves and each another. SMACNA’s Director of Market Sectors and Health, Mike McCullion, has been involved in safety for more than 30 years and is excited about the changes. “Safety used to be based on engineering and compliance, but now, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are moving towards a science-based approach that includes human factors, such as occupational illnesses and infectious diseases,” McCullion says. “It is transforming from an engineering mindset to a scientific mindset.” He refers to respirators as a prime example of this. Once an integral part of safety when working with chemicals or silica, today they are a necessity. “In certain tasks, workers would use N95 respirator masks, but with the pandemic a lot of nuances have come out about masks, especially the difference between a facial covering or mask and a respirator,” he says. “There is a clear distinction that needs to be made and to understand the science behind it for the well-being of the worker.” 4 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
Phillip Ragain, director of training and human performance at The RAD Group, who was on the safety panel at the 2020 Partners In Progress conference, says he is seeing an increasing number of organizations jump on this generative safety culture train and become a lot more proactive. “In what is sometimes called ‘the good old days,’ it was common for people to boast about the hazards, incidents, and near misses they endured at work,” Raigan says. “Tolerating risk was not only seen as part of the job, it was regarded informally as a badge of honor. “I recall one client that manufactured very large pieces of industrial equipment. When a piece of equipment was completed, the owner of the company would walk the elevated beams of that equipment without fall protection, almost like a tightrope walker. It was his way of commissioning it for service. The owner, and many of the employees who witnessed the display, saw it as a demonstration of courage and solidarity with the workers who put themselves at risk to build the equipment. It was a strange feature of the culture at the time—the belief that exposing oneself to unnecessary risk is respectable rather than foolhardy.” However, Ragain says, this attitude is becoming one of the past. “Risky workplace behavior is no longer admired, and the idea that tolerating risk makes you a better worker appears to vanish a little every day,” he says.
