Safety First: Working With Safety Consultants

July/August 2005

In case you don’t know it yet, ReMA has just launched ReMA Safety Consulting Services, a program that brings safety professionals to members’ yards to help them identify and solve safety problems before they become accidents. There’s enough promotional material coming your way that I won’t burden you with the program’s features and benefits in this space. Instead, I’d like to discuss the proper care and feeding of safety consultants.
   Let’s stipulate to a few points up front:
1. You’ve got safety issues to address, or else you wouldn’t have called in a consultant in the first place. There’s no shame in this. You run a hectic business in a thriving market, and your attention is divided a thousand ways. Things are going to slip through the cracks. Even the occasional really big thing is going to slip through the cracks. It happens.
2. Pointing out weaknesses is the first step in solving problems. It is not 
a personal affront, nor is it a veiled accusation of incompetence. Consultants see a snapshot of the conditions that exist on the day(s) of their visit. They are by definition unaware of the hard work and progress that have made conditions in your facility so much better than they were a year ago. 
3. We’re the good guys. We’ve all been stung by the expert at the door who alleges to want to help, when in fact the ulterior motive is to cost us more money. For our purposes here, those are the bad guys. The hired consultant, on the other hand, is your advocate. His motive is to make your yard a safer place to work and, in the process, help you comply with a standard or two.
   Let me pause here to backpedal a bit. The insurance industry in particular is in the midst of a paradigm shift. 
More and more, workers’ comp providers (and to a lesser extent, general liability providers) are offering safety consulting expertise that is not directly tied to underwriting. These services can be provided free of charge, depending on the size and status of the customer. This is certainly true of the RecycleGuard companies. For more information on RecycleGuard consulting programs, call Barney Boynton at 603/334-3030.
   Now, back to our discussion. During my hands-on plant safety management days, my staff and I built a darn good program from the ground up. It took a few years, but with focus, determination, and a team approach, we effectively changed the corporate DNA to the point where safety, quality, and profit all had equal places at the management table.
   It was hard not to be insulted, then, when management decided to bring in a consultant from the outside to review what we were doing. I didn’t need the help, thank you very much. And where the hell was this outsider when I was working 13-hour days to develop the program? From where I sat, the last thing I needed was input from some guy whose livelihood depended on pointing out what I had yet to fix.
   When we finally met, however, everything changed. After the initial pleasantries, our new consultant asked me, “What’s the one problem you’re having the toughest time solving? We’ll concentrate on that first. Then we’ll move to the second most daunting problem, and we’ll keep going until this is really the place you want it to be.”
   I confess I was shocked. Hiring the outside consultant wasn’t anything close to a vote of no confidence in my work. Rather, it was senior management’s way of giving me the extra credibility I needed to tackle the issues that seemed to defy solution. The greatest obstacle in our first meetings turned out to be my own defensiveness. It took a while for me to realize that the consultant’s mission actually was to help my career by making my program—and, therefore, me—look and be as effective as possible.
   In short order, I started stockpiling difficult questions and situations, saving them for the weeks when the consultant would be on-site. We became a working team, and that’s precisely what you should shoot for as you deal with your own consultants.
   We’re not regulators. When OSHA shows up to perform an inspection, it makes perfect sense to direct the compliance officer to the cleanest, most impressive parts of your facility. If he happens not to see the scary pit under the baler where even cockroaches die on entry, so much the better.
   When a consultant shows up, the exact opposite is true. You’re paying for expertise, so it makes sense to focus first on the greatest perceived hazards. But all too often, the instinct of scrap managers is to try to impress the consultant as if he were any other visitor. They give the VIP tour with the pep talk about quality and customer service, and they show off only the shiniest, newest equipment.
   Don’t take offense, but I think I speak for safety consultants everywhere when I say: We don’t care about any of that. Sure, we admire customer service as much as the next person, but we’re not there to buy or sell anything. We’d much prefer that you shed the defensive armor and open the corporate kimono for a thorough review of things 
as they really are, starting with the ugly stuff. It’s more challenging for us and more rewarding for you. Honestly, there’s no downside here.
   And if the consultant shows an attitude, you can always give him a flashlight and ask him to take a look at that pit under the baler. 

John Gilstrap, director of safety for ISRI