SPEAKER 1: Hey, Tony, good morning. Thanks for having us. I want to say thanks first for WTW and also AGC for helping us drive safety innovation in the industry, helping them improve as we go. Very much appreciate your help and thanks for having us.
So Stacy Witbeck is a heavy construction infrastructure builder. We do focus on transit work, rail, bus rapid transit, similar, streetcar commuter rail, high speed rail. All of that is considered transit. We started back in 1981 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first expansion markets really was Portland, Oregon, Salt Lake city, Utah.
And from then, we've expanded across the nation. And more recently, the projects have become mega projects often $1 billion or more, very complex, a lot of urban areas, stakeholder engagement. So complex projects is really what we focus on. We're 100% employee owned through an ESOP organization and really strong in the West. We do work in the East, but really Denver West is where our strength is, particularly in the Western Coast states.
We still perform 50% to 60% of the work on typical projects. So we have the advantage of the boots on the ground driving the pace of the work and setting the pace for safety. My role specifically, I'm president of the heavy infrastructure group. We have two operating groups, the heavy civil and then the systems, that's the signaling railroad communications, the electrification group.
And there's a lead over on that side too, we both report to our CEO, George Fernandes, who sits in Oakland, California. So I have oversight over the heavy civil group. And I have Keith with me here today. Keith Torkelson, you want to introduce yourself, Keith?
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah. Thanks, Clayton. And again, appreciate Tony for inviting us to be a part of this. Keith Torkelson, I'm a regional manager covering the mountain states regions for our company.
I started with Stacy Witbeck as an intern about 20 years ago, and I've been with him ever since, traveled around a lot of the areas on the West Coast that we've done work from Washington to Portland to Salt lake, Northern California. And currently I sit down here in Las Vegas, Nevada, supporting the high speed rail from Las Vegas to LA. And it's been a great career. Appreciate all that I've learned and glad for this opportunity.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. Thanks, Keith and thanks, Clayton. Keith, I'm going to start with you. Can you describe in the broadest terms how important safety is within your organization.
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah, great question. I'm just going to go through my growth and my career. But from the day that I stepped on as an intern to this point, safety has always led the conversations, has always led the trainings that I've received as an intern, as a young field engineer all the way through.
And so from my perspective, safety always has led every aspect of what we do as a company. And so I just think that speaks to the importance of it. And so that's what I would say.
TONY MILITELLO: So just to continue on with that thread a little bit further, Keith, you said you've been there for 20 years. Maybe take it a little bit of a historical or chronological look. What looks different today than it looked like 10 years ago or maybe 20 years ago then when you started? What looks different today?
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah, that's a great question. What looks different today than it did 10 years ago was that, I think 10 years ago, the way that safety was being pushed down to the craft level. So 10 years ago, decisions were being made at the management level being pushed down to the crews.
And today, we actually ask the crews to basically push safety back up through the organization. And the reason why that's important is that, when we make decisions at a high level and try to push down the crews, we've noticed that we get less buy in from our frontline employees. Whereas when they're a part of the discussion, they're pushing safety back up through the organization.
With the support from the top, we have witnessed a greater buy in from our frontline employees and therefore we've seen our safety increase on all of our work.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Keith. Clayton, Keith talked a little bit about the overarching buy in from the employees, which is obviously paramount to the safety and the success of your organization. Can you dig a little bit deeper and talk about maybe some of the programs that contribute to that reduction and can contribute to your management of operational risk.
CLAYTON: Yeah, Tony. Sure. Just to tack on to what Keith said about the overarching importance. We can't do this work without having excellent safety results. We can't compete in the marketplace. We can't compete for great talent or retain great talent. They want to work at a safe place.
The whole point of doing this work, besides improving the infrastructure in the communities we live and work, we're trying to create financial and career opportunities for folks. And all of that really is about going home to family and friends and doing what they love. So it's just so important.
If you go back to 2019, 2020, Tony, at the COVID launch, we as a company we thought we had a strong program. But like he said, it did seem like a lot of decisions were made at the top and pushed down. And we said, we need to take another step forward. We need to evolve. We need to be more aggressive, more progressive on how we do this.
And at that particular moment in the spring of 2020, Katie Nance, our safety director, she invited me to a safety summit hosted by Caterpillar Safety Services down in San Diego. And it was different than what I expected. It was way more leadership-focused. It was a bunch of actual construction executives that were also trying to push their programs forward.
And it was at that moment we said, we believe Caterpillar is the right partner at this moment to help us push forward. We launched into this journey with Cat Safety Services, who had, had their own safety journey in manufacturing. They had, had their own issues that they needed to correct and had experienced a lot of improvement.
And what we liked about the program was very scientific. They were all behavioral scientists, if that's the right term. And they really understood what makes people make the right decision. And there was a ton of leadership material and we really felt like there were broad benefits beyond safety. The leadership skills that program would bring to us would translate directly to productivity and quality and just general leadership.
So we started that journey with them. We branded it Crew 360. That's what we call the program. The program is it's a continuous improvement program. That's the core of it. It's made up of a steering team of craft folks, front line supervisors, middle managers and executive level sponsorship. The participation in the steering team rotates constantly. There's new executives, new supervisors constantly coming in, and we use safety assessments to understand what areas we should focus on.
So we've chosen over the last four years four topics to refine, and it could be adding something to our program. It could be refining something that's already in our program. It could be even deleting something from our program if it's cluttering up or distracting from the most effective parts of our program.
So we've enjoyed that process and we think we're better for it. We try to ignore the lagging indicators. For the most part, we're looking at observations, safety conversations, all forward looking indicators. But we can report best ever safety, lagging indicators also as of 2023, best in our company history.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. Thanks, Clayton. So from those conversations and inspections and really that engagement between leadership and the craft workers, what have you seen as being some of the most significant exposures and risks that your company faces?
CLAYTON: But the biggest one that actually alerted us to our most recent continuous improvement team is just decision making. The assessment we sent out, people came back and said that they either have or have observed people taking risks.
And so this decision making is at the core and we reflect on it and we try to understand like, is it something about our culture? Is it something that we've said or is it just something that's innate to construction where you're trying to be productive and you're trying to move quickly and you take shortcuts and maybe it's a little bit of all of that?
But what we're really focusing on is no matter what you write down in a policy, really what controls the day is the accepted norms. So if a frontline supervisor takes a shortcut, that's going to be the accepted norm and that's going to rule the day. So we really feel like if we can set the example with frontline supervisors we've always been making great decisions, pulling back from a risky situation, resetting, that's where we're going to have the most success.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. Keith, tell me a little bit about how that manifests itself out in practice. You're down close to the boots on the ground. I know that Clayton gets out to the job sites and sees that work in practice as well. But as you're living that day-to-day Keith, what does that look like for you? How effective have you seen that as an approach?
KEITH TORKELSON: We've had great success with it. And I think going back to Clayton's point on, we don't focus on lagging indicators but we did have our best recordable incident rate last year. And so I think it's providing results.
And so I'll just take for example, one of the very first initiatives that we went through were our safety observation, safety walks, pretty typical, I think with most companies to go perform some safety walk on a periodic basis. Sometimes the clients require that we do it different things like that.
But for the longest time, those observations were to go out and to correct- the focus was on finding safety issues, correcting safety issues. And as we started to engage our craft, frontline employees to talk about how we better implement safety walks and things like that, the entire purpose of the safety walk transformed into an opportunity for management supervisors to go out and to have conversations and to focus on the work, the crew, the great things that are happening.
Of course, we observe things that need correction. But the idea was to take a holistic approach to engage say, a specific crew that you're going out to visit that day to take a holistic view of everything they're doing and recognize the great things that happen, the great work.
And then part of that observation, we bring some of the safety risks in. We have conversations about what risks are out there, what do you guys identify in your JHS, different things like that. And they get to express, all those conversations that happened before they ever started this work. And so you get a real recognition for all the planning that went into it and all of that. And then you walk away.
And of course, there are some safety things that need to be corrected. But all of that gets put together. What we found is that it's just received so much better. It used to be when you'd show up for a safety walk, it was like, really, you're coming out to slow us down for the day. Everything's like that.
Now, we have crews that they want it, they enjoy it. They enjoy the conversation. They enjoy the recognition for the hard work that they put in. It helps to drive their psyche to just do better. And we've just seen a huge improvement in our culture around safety and around what we're trying to accomplish out there. And so it's been night and day. It's a night and day difference, Tony.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. Thanks Keith and Clayton both. Really sounds like Stacy Witbeck got their hands and arms around the core fundamentals of what it takes to lead the organization and really drive that safety culture. And again, the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, as they say, to really get after what are the things that are going to make a difference at the individual decision making level and really at the programmatic level.
So as much as people like the fundamentals, there's also an insatiable appetite, as you can imagine, for technology and innovation. Those two words are also on people's lips. And for of mine for a lot of folks. And those can easily overcome some of the fundamentals of blocking and tackling. But so for you, what does technology and innovation look like? What are the things that really are the focus in those two areas for Stacy Witbeck?
CLAYTON: Yeah. Tony, you don't mind I'll hit a couple, and then maybe Keith got a couple, too. But I feel like a lot of what I would share would be technology, not necessarily innovation, at least at first. But EHS heavy job safety as a communication tool is excellent for us. It's great technology. All of the safety materials, resources, all the communications come across EHS safety.
I get emails on every observation, every safety walk. It gives me an opportunity to stay in touch with the field and then I can call up somebody and say, hey, great job. I saw this observation. You're doing great work. And that's a core part of Crew 360, is catching someone doing the right thing and genuinely appreciating their work.
So I think that EHS safety as a communication tool keeps us all connected. Maybe seven years ago, it might have been an innovation. Now, it's just a technology. It's woven into what we do and we're appreciative of that technology.
I've seen other things help us that would be considered technology like we would video a great safety briefing where a crew would go through their work. They would not just talk about safety. They would talk about the plan for the day, the assignments, the schedule, what you're trying to conquer for the day.
And so we can use that in our training to say, hey, this is what a great start for the day looks like. So people can actually see that. Just the overall communication. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily innovative just yet. Keith got one, I think he wants to share in terms of innovation.
I think we shared at the awards, we do have a QR code in our helmets that has all of our safety resources in it. So anybody, no matter where they are, scan the QR code, you can get to all of our resources. So there are things like that kind of strewn throughout the program.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. Thanks, Clayton. Keith, before I get to you. You hit on it and you think you under underestimate or maybe undervalued, just the use of the technology that you did describe, Clayton. It doesn't need to be to your point, it doesn't need to be innovative to be the use of technology.
What technology do we have available? We have mobile devices, we have cloud based devices, we have information that's able to be digitized and put in the hands of the people that need it the most. Just that transition or just the evolution from pencil and paper to spreadsheet to some other type of platform that again, delivers that information to the hands of the craft worker or the superintendent or the foreman or the people that are using that information.
That's a huge technology advance that not everybody has. You think that it becomes commonplace because it has been to your point, six or seven years that you've had it in place. But that still is leading the industry in ways that you think, well, why doesn't everybody have that? Why doesn't everybody do this?
But again, technology doesn't need to be put man on the moon. It can be just moving from pencil and paper to a more standardized, digitized way of getting the information from the knowledge source, whatever that looks like, into the hands of the craft worker. So certainly applaud you for doing that and taking that, just using the technology that's available.
Keith, again, Clayton mentioned that you've got some innovative ideas or examples of innovations within the organization. What might those be?
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah, I think as an organization, we're always trying to get better and technology advances. And so you're always studying this new technology and you might be able to employ it to improve operational efficiencies and in doing so, safety.
And one of the current ones that we're taking a look at our organization, doing a lot of transit work we often work in live transit corridors. A corridor might have a class I railroad that runs down it, 80 trains in a 12-hour period or light rail streetcar and we're working alongside of it.
And so in the past, kicking off a project, it takes a lot of planning and a lot of working with those stakeholders to build up trust on how we work in around them to make sure that their operations are protected, they're safe, and that we also keep our own employees safe from the work that they have going on through that corridor and whatnot.
And you're starting to see technology around that you can create a digital fence. We have all this technology with respect to GPS and the satellites and all these different things. And today you can actually- there's technology out there that you can actually employ on a project that would create a digital fence that's tied to your equipment that will not allow that equipment to swing into harm's way.
And therefore, creating a much safer work environment not only for your own workers but also for your stakeholders and whatnot. And so there's a lot of neat technology out there. It seems like every year there's just all this new technology that pops up. We study it. We determine if there's the ability to actually deploy that and does it make sense. Anyway, so we're always looking.
CLAYTON: Tony, I think it might have been down in San Diego we heard about the possibility of videoing a morning job briefing and a translating to Spanish. I think that came maybe from your session in San Diego that's something we should look at.
And then to your point Tony, about how it doesn't necessarily have to be innovative necessarily, but the helmets, it doesn't seem innovative to us, this transition from hardhats to helmets because we feel like we might have been a little behind, actually. But it is an innovation. It's better protection, no question. But it's very interesting to us how hard the transition was.
You never really understood how construction workers were so concerned about how they look. Wow, it was impressive. They just pushed back pretty hard. But I think we're getting over it. But in any a violent situation, how much better to have more protection and the strap, so it stays on. I mean, it seems so obvious, but it was a tough transition.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, I know. I appreciate that Clayton and Keith both. And Clayton, a little bit to your point and really ties in with what Keith's mentioned earlier about employee engagement and asking the feedback from the craft worker.
Innovation may not be innovative to the two of you because you've seen a lot more. But if it's new to the employee, if it's new to the craft worker, engaging them and allowing them to express, hey, boss, is there a better way to do this? And then yeah, maybe there is.
And so that's the way also to extract innovation from the craft workers is what you've already said. You've set up a great relationship in that safety culture between the foreman and superintendents and the craft workers. That's another way to extract innovation too, is to say, what's new for you? What looks different for you? What are ways that we, Stacy Witbeck can continue to lean in and create a safer environment for you?
And so again, you may not have to find it as innovative, but if it's innovative to the craft worker, they consider the fact that their company is listening and that breeds loyalty and commitment and a safer culture that you really can't put a price tag on.
KEITH TORKELSON: So now another one of our continuous improvement initiatives coming out of Crew 360, we did a deep dive into our morning job briefings. And in that process- and again, these continuous improvement teams, these are craft led. They are craft led.
It is a craft group of folks that get together and basically critique the current program that was probably created from an executive level push down and they critiqued this to develop something they felt would be more useful get more buy in.
And one of the things that came out of that was, at lunch they sit down. They consume some food, they have a break. And then coming out of that, they recognize the fact that there's a benefit to re-engaging in a very brief moment.
That morning briefing and actually have a discussion about things that might have changed throughout the process, whatever that is. Whether they ran into something unexpected or they're a little bit further along than they thought. And so they're going to move into some new work that they didn't really talk about.
Or it's going not as good as they expected it to and to talk about why. But take a moment to re-engage everybody to ensure a safe afternoon because that's the time that leads to them getting in their vehicles and getting home. And so that came out of that discussion, which came up from the craft and great idea. And out there trying to deploy that now.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. That's great, Keith. That's a great example. So in terms of overall safety and risk reduction, what lies ahead? We're halfway through the construction season, halfway through the calendar year, halfway through the summer construction season. What lies ahead for the rest of this year and planning forward looking into next year?
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah, I think I'm just going to talk from a really quick from a Crew 360 standpoint maybe, and then let Clayton run with it. But I think for us, every two years we do a safety perception survey that goes out to our entire enterprise craft, everybody.
And that's the data upon which we decide what elements that need to be addressed through some continuous improvement. That is this year for us, so this September, October. We will go through a new safety perception survey, gather fresh data. It'll be compared to- this will be the third one we went through.
And it's always comparable to the previous ones. It's the same questions everything. And so it gives us an indication on how we're doing. But we'll gather some new data and into early next year we'll decide on a couple of continuous improvement initiatives that need to be tackled.
And we'll generate a group of craft people to come in and start to take a look at how to improve in those areas. And so that's probably the big thing that's upcoming for us from a Crew 360 standpoint.
TONY MILITELLO: Thanks, Keith.
CLAYTON: I would maybe add, Tony, is on this Crew 360 journey. We've noticed that we have a lot of engagement at the executive level, really quite a bit of energy, passion. And then we have a lot of engagement at the craft level and frontline supervision. That's good.
But there's this group in the middle call them regional managers, area managers, just the level above project managers, that group somehow it feels like a gap. And I don't know exactly how that happened because we thought we were communicating. We thought we were all working together, but it just doesn't seem like it's as quite as direct or quite as effective in that group. So that's on me to fix, Tony.
I'm just going to double down on that and make sure we don't have any gaps. I think that's really important. And then the other thing that's happening later this year, you're probably familiar with the CISI summit.
There's the executive leaders from all the big players, the best in the business, that usually one executive, one safety person, they get together and we just share our soul, the good, bad, the ugly, great things come out of that.
And high tide floats all the boats like we don't believe we're the best. But we very much appreciate everyone's effort on improving industrywide because let's be honest, we share resources. Those craft personnel are moving across projects and moving across employers at times. And we all need all of the craft folks to be performing at the highest level.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. Thanks, Clayton. I know that this probably comes as no consolation, but that gap in the middle management level is not unique to your organization. It's not unique to your industry either.
Certainly you've been there, both of you. As you progress through your careers, you've been at some point in time, in the middle management piece, and they call it the middle for that reason. And those people can certainly express that they're feeling exactly the pressures that you describe. They're feeling the top down saying get this done. They're feeling the feedback that we want from the craft worker, from the bottom up. And they are feeling it. They are feeling squeezed.
And so it stands to reason that sometimes things get lost in translation or it's either information overload. But yeah, that's a critical part to make sure that they too, are able to engage in and be communicative of and really have an appreciation for the message that is trying to be delivered down to the craft worker, but also from the craft worker up to the senior leadership.
They are the ones that make sure that the senior leadership get the information from the craft worker. So middle management is by no means an envious position, but certainly a critical one, as you've identified.
Clayton, as a senior leader within your organization, what would you recommend to others that are focused on safety? What are the things that you find critical to say? Listen, here's a piece of mentoring advice. I suggest that you the following.
CLAYTON: Yeah, Tony, that's pretty easy. Just get involved. You think of turn back time and think about Keith's career, intern, field engineer, superintendent, just get involved. At first, I think with the younger folks it might seem like they don't understand the material. They're not seasoned enough to maybe participate or make comments, whatever. But if you can get involved, you'll start to learn from the veteran, craft folks.
It's just a simple thing. If a field engineer got involved in onboarding, doing some of the safety training for a project, you find out what you know when you try to present material. It's one thing to sit and listen. It's a completely different thing to articulate it. And so they can really develop their leadership skills, their safety acumen on the actual details.
So yeah, just get involved, contribute to the conversation, make sure it's part of every conversation. We believe that the executive support is crucial, but day-to-day, the front line supervisor has the most impact. That's the person that is going to make a decision minute-to-minute throughout the day. However, many hundreds of decisions they make before breakfast. And those are the people that are really- so the culture that front line supervisor is really what we have to focus on.
TONY MILITELLO: Thanks, Clayton. Keith, any final comments from you before I turn it back to Clayton for some final words.
KEITH TORKELSON: Yeah, just echoing a little bit of what Clayton just stated there. I think what I've learned, over the last two years, I've been the co-chair leading our safety steering team under Crew 360. So Clayton talking about people getting engaged, I think what I've learned out of it, man, I've become more and more impressed with our craft level employees.
I clearly didn't have as great of a appreciation for what they do until I got engaged in this intimate opportunity with them to engage with them in these, our safety steering team.
And I would say 75% of our safety steering team is made up of craft employees. And what they actually bring to the table and the knowledge that they bring and the perspective that they bring, it has made me a better person, just in general. And so I appreciate that opportunity.
And if anybody out there looking to grow themselves, I would say get involved. In any opportunity you have to engage with your craft employees in a scenario like safety. And it's just going to make you a better person.
TONY MILITELLO: All right. Thanks, Keith. Clayton, any final comments.
CLAYTON: Well, just want to thank you, Tony and AGC WTW for everything you're doing to keep pushing the industry forward in terms of high performance, safety programs. I want to thank also our industry partners, our competitors in the industry, they're always helping make us better, giving us new ideas.
And I guess I'm really happy to see how far the industry has come, like in the last decade. I'm proud to be part of the industry that's so focused. The most honorable thing there possibly could be is to send people home safely to their family and friends. So it's a very honorable effort. I'm proud to be involved with it.
And guess to give you my promise that I'll be a good steward of our people in our company and in our industry and hope to see you at the next AGC event.
TONY MILITELLO: Thank you both really for your time today and all that you've done to really demonstrate leadership again, not just within your organization, but within our industry at large. And so with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Max.
MAX NELSON: Thank you for listening to another episode of the podcast series dedicated to winners of the 2024 AGC Construction Safety Excellence Awards. We hope you are taking away insights that can be applied to your own programs and processes. For more information on the CSEA, visit www.agc.org/csea. If you found value in today's episode, don't forget to like and follow the show.
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