TONY MILITELLO: Thanks, Max. This is Tony Militello from WTW. And I'm excited to be joined today by my friend and leader of Sundt Construction Safety, whom I'm going to turn this over to, to talk a little bit about his role and his company's safety program. Over to you, Paul.
PAUL LEVIN: All right, Tony. Hey, thanks. Really a pleasure to be here. Excited to be here, talk about industry safety, construction, safety, safety here at Sundt, and really just try and share what we're doing. And just like what we're all about is sharing best practices so we can improve safety in our industry. So just really pumped to be here today. Thank you, Tony.
TONY MILITELLO: Wonderful. Paul, in the broadest terms, how important is safety to your organization?
PAUL LEVIN: You know, this question, how important is safety to your organization- I think that safety is important to all of us every day, everywhere to our organization. Yeah, of course. I was always kind of shocked when I first joined Sundt to see how important it was. I think the commitment to do work safely is something that doesn't even have to be spoken about. It's just something that is inherently part of what we do here.
I know it has to do with employee ownership. I've worked at other organizations where safety was important. But I'm not sure it was threaded through everything like I've been able to see it here. I think when we're all part of something together, it just integrated and we're constantly trying to improve it without having to say we've got to improve it. So it's been a core value.
We're 134-year-old self-performing company. Safety has always been part of that as a core value here, going back over 100 years. So I would say-- I don't even know if important is the right word or the best word, but it is integrated into everything we do. And excited to be here to talk more about it.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, that's wonderful. And that's been my experience, again, listening to you and talking with you, again, some of the programs that I've seen have certainly really made some stand out as a leader in the safety business. Can you tell me a little bit about some of those safety programs that you have in place for reducing operational risk?
PAUL LEVIN: Again, the words are just awesome to talk about here. The phrase, reduce operational risk. And maybe you see the same thing, Tony. But I don't know about reducing operational. I guess we're trying to manage and plan and prepare for it.
I've really starting to realize that maybe what we do, at least here at Sundt-- we do transportation, we do industrial, we do commercial building, we do renewables, we do structural concrete. And then we were with the trade partners on our jobs. I know we try to reduce risk, but I think maybe the new way is just being better prepared for the risk. We're still saying we'll talk more about or stop the sticky program.
But five and a half years ago, 15% of our incidents were sticky. Here we are, five years later, 15% of our incidents are sticky. We're doing a personal risk tolerance assessment at higher for our employees and then at orientation on jobs. And the score is 85%. And that means 15% of the time people are, I guess, okay with putting themselves at a higher risk of choice.
And so I'm just wondering now, we're always going to try and reduce operational risk for sure. But I think maybe the key in the future is better planning, better prepping. I know we try to do that. But maybe we're always going to be up against 15% of the stuff we do is inherently dangerous or sticky or what we call a SIF potential.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. Again, maybe to your point, maybe what it is is not so much reducing the operational risk in terms of the amount of exposure or the frequency of the exposure, but maybe what happens by all that preparation work that you're talking about. Maybe that's where we talk about reducing the operational risk outcomes. Maybe that was a word that might have been missing in the question because we're reducing the severity, we're reducing the frequency there.
The risk is still there. You're still doing high hazard work across the country. And so if people are doing the same thing or it's the same type of people with those same type of perceptions for risk tolerance, maybe what we're talking about by doing all that preplanning is exactly that- reducing the operational risk outcomes, not so much the risk itself.
PAUL LEVIN: I want try and answer your question, though. I owe it to you to try and answer this question. All companies, they're going to have safety plans. But what's been interesting lately- we've been really kind of doubling down on our risk management plans, which is- anyone can argue what is a metrics to start at.
But we use an EMR of one or above not to disqualify any company organization, but to sit down with them and see, OK, your EMR is above 1, where are you at on your safety journey and is there anything we can do to help. Or specifically on this job that you want to do with us, what can we do to make sure that it's a safe job for you. And that's been really enjoyable lately, just checking in on companies because companies go through ups and downs. They have incidents. Many companies have an EMR that might be above 1. And we're just trying to help them improve their safety and stay competitive.
The other thing is we have an exhibit D, which is 7 pages. Sounds like a lot, but it's seven pages of scripted prescriptive things we want companies to do on our jobs that are above governmental regulations and are really there to help manage that risk we mentioned, Tony, The rules are foundational. But we're trying to do more than that, like vertical elements of rebar and structural components of that, relentless housekeeping program. So we're trying to reduce risk by implementing things that we've had success with.
And one of the things that's an exhibit D is the movement to a type II helmet, which many companies are going through that process of evaluating that- should we do it, how do we do it, what's the best way, how do we get our trade partners integrated into that mindset. And so we've been spending time in exhibit D, making sure we're clear on that requirement. That's going to be part of all Sundt jobs moving forward.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, that's great to hear, Paul. Again, you taking advantage of exactly what you mentioned earlier. You've got 130 plus years of experience and you're taking full advantage of that and leveraging that experience, the positives and the challenges, and bringing that to bear to the industry. And that really is what, again, makes you one of the leaders in that industry and in that space.
You talked about some of the maybe fundamental things that you've done. What about-- technology and innovation typically are key buzzwords that are always for of mine on individuals. They think that those are the things that are going to get people ahead. Talk a little bit about how you are innovating and using technology to contribute to your safety risk management journey.
PAUL LEVIN: Recently, we were awarded the 2024 Autodesk Innovation of the Year Award, partnering with AGC. And that was a great experience to share our stop to sticky program, our five components of stop to sticky. But within that, there's some tech we've been able to use currently. We're using a platform called InEight, but within InEight, you're allowed to build your own version of the app.
And it's been great to see how we're capturing our incidents with a new logic that we haven't seen used before, where we're pushing upstream the release of energy. So we're talking about when any unplanned event happens, we're capturing that flow of sticky, non-sticky. And so that was something we built on our own.
The second thing is we created what the CSRA, the Construction Safety Research Alliance, calls high energy control assessments or HECA. We call those sticky walks here at Sundt. And for almost two years now, we've been having operations do a sticky walk once a week, we have our safety team members do one a day, and that tech immediately captures all that information and then we're able to dashboard that.
So not really too high end, but the ability to craft your own process in these apps is pretty amazing. And these dashboards are just unbelievable when you think about how you and I, Tony, spent years in spreadsheets and trying to figure that out. And now you put that same information from a spreadsheet into a dashboard and it's pretty compelling what you can capture and share.
Next is I think the use of AI in safety meetings is something that is untapped for us in the industry. These safety meetings that have been around forever. And we jokingly say in meetings sometimes that we should stop doing safety meetings and see what would happen. And we think what would happen is we'd still have the meeting. It'd just be called a planning meeting.
We still need to plan your day and safety still needs to be a part of it. So we're really trying to unpack that and put it back together better. And what we've been through our whole careers to now and seeing somehow how AI can help us do that.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, that's great. Before we get any further, obviously, sticky is a core fundamental piece of your world and Sundt construction and it's part of my vernacular as well. But maybe for some of the listeners who are a little bit unfamiliar with that, can you unpack that sticky and a little bit what that program means for you guys?
PAUL LEVIN: Yeah. No, for sure. I appreciate the question on that. It's about five and a half years ago, we're doing industry work. We had guest speakers come. We had some talk about rules and rules don't keep you safe. And we were looking at our own incidents. And with the use of the apps, interestingly enough, the app took paper and pencil and created email.
So we had an incident, you get an email. And we were looking at why aren't our emails going down even though our recordable rate's going down. We saw that the industry stat on fatalities was not moving in the right direction. And so we were playing around with this- how do we get in front of our front line, how do we get their attention.
And we started just talking about, hey, this stuff right here can kill you. And it really got a positive result from our front line about this stuff can kill you. When we ran our numbers- so it's one thing to have a set of words, and cursing is something that we're very comfortable with. And so that fit well.
The other part was that's what we really showed when we ran our numbers. We ran our numbers in 2019, we had 76 incidents that year that could have killed someone, and 71% of those were pure luck that it didn't. And that was the wake up call of understanding that this is a reality, that we do have these incidents that we all saw come through the emails. We all saw them on reports. But nothing really happened.
You try to capture a near miss out of that and learn from it. But there wasn't this pointed focus on, holy cow, this is what we're dealing with. So that's kind of the short version of we knew something was awry with the emails not going down, with fatalities not going down. When we ran our numbers, it was pretty scary to see what was out there.
And then since then, we're in year six and that number, like we mentioned earlier, 15% of our incidents are inherently dangerous to our workforce is still out there. And it's all out there for all of us to try and attack and plan for and understand that maybe this concept of zero, which we all want zero, but maybe we need to understand that this business that we know is inherently dangerous. Maybe it's more real close to us than we might want to believe.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, great. I appreciate that, Paul. One of the things that I've seen, and I suspect you have as well, is behind every successful safety program is leadership support. Can you talk a little bit about how you found leadership to be supportive of both the sticky program and other things that you've got going on and things that you have planned for the future and how really that safety leadership has supported the safety mindset at your organization?
PAUL LEVIN: So when we start walking through our stop to sticky program and we go back the five and a half years and you say, OK, well, if you had those 76 times of high energy incident, what did you do about it. And it's pretty humbling to walk down the hall and talk to your CEO and talk to your leaders and say, okay we have this EMR here, we have this recordable injury rate here that we think is going in the right direction. But we think we just uncovered that, 76 times, we could have had a really bad incident. And it's like, well, what do you do about that.
And the ability to gather some people up, we started out with an executive safety committee, which was our senior leaders and our senior safety leaders. It was about 10 of us. And we meet every month and start breaking down what we're finding. And then saying, OK, so if that's true, if we really believe that 15% of our incidents could have a bad outcome, what are we going to do about it. And we really redesigned our belief system around safety and then, from there, looked at our actions and said, OK, what are we really doing. We have to do all this stuff, but what are we really doing that has the biggest impact.
So you're right on with safety leadership. It started with that executive safety committee of about 10 of us. We probably met for, I don't know, a year or so going through this and redefining safety here at Sundt. And then we expanded that to about 30 people now. We call that the safety leadership team. And we're still meeting every month.
Those are the 30 people that get every email of every incident. And it's really just been a great journey the last five and a half years with those folks and getting them to understand what we're really up against.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah. So what lies ahead? What are the things that you're going to capture and what are the things that you've learned? You talked a little bit about AI and technology and things that you have planned for the future. What might be the key focus areas as you move into the rest of this year and into next year?
PAUL LEVIN: Well, we've learned that when you capture information and you try to dashboard it, if you make too many changes, you can crash your dashboard. You can really break the link there. So we try to, every summer, right about now, figure out what's the next iteration of information we want to capture and share.
There's a lot of information you can capture. You have to be really particular on what is it that drives behavior or drives the next step of our safety program. So we've been capturing sticky walks for over a year now. We've created a new metrics called stop work rate is that how many times on a sticky walk we had to stop the work because of direct control or a safeguard were not in place, and we can talk more about that phrase, Tony.
But direct control and a safeguard- direct control is something that really is put on the energy source, such as lockout tagout or a tool tether or fall protection versus a safeguard, which is more of a controlled access zone or a spotter. And so we're measuring those things. We're finding out that 12% of the time, we're stopping work, which is another humbling conversation to have with leadership. You would think you're better than that, but that's what we're finding.
And then from there is, well, why are we stopping work 12% of the time. Are we not recognizing the high energy, are we not identifying a direct control or safeguard, are we not implementing or executing on those things? And so the next phase for us is to go behind the curtain one more time and really figure out when we stop the work and direct controls and safeguards are not in place, why, what is going down there, is it a knowledge training experience issue or is it a choice issue in the moment, is it a choice issue due to jobsite pressures, is there other situations. So we're pretty excited about that.
And then the other part is the untapped potential of safety meetings and how our leaders, our craft to form in, our form in to field superintendent responsibilities there working with them to be better communicators. And then also the comprehension of our crews and understanding the plan. We can't just have one person pushing safety when we have a crew there that needs to assess risk themselves and put a plan together to protect themselves.
So I think the continuation of capturing what really happens out in the field and then using that information to help us plan better is what we're going to be working on as we move forward.
TONY MILITELLO: Thanks, Paul. That's what I've seen certainly over the last couple of years. And some of the leaders in our industry are the construction industry. And others really have, they've coupled both the go to 0 or focus on 0 incidents. But on the other end of the spectrum is exactly what you mentioned, which is how do we get to 100% controls in place.
Everybody likes 100. They want the gold star. They want to be 100%. And so that sometimes is an easier thing for people to fathom and kind of put their mind around is, OK, in your case, you said 88% of the time, controls were in place, but 12% of the time, they weren't. So how do we drive that number of times where they weren't in place- how do we drive that number down to zero so that we're driving the number of times that controls are in place- how do we drive that number to 100%?
So that, again, is really remarkable that you are focusing on not just the go to zero incidents and injuries and illnesses, but also 100% of the times when we go do our walks, we find that the controls are in place. Again, that's really exceptional work on your part. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah. So if you had one single thing to put as the most important element of your safety program, what do you think that would be?
PAUL LEVIN: That's pretty easy. It's radical candor. I thought long and hard about this. Radical candor is when you care personally, but you challenge directly. I'll give you a-- it's a book by Kim Scott. Give a shout out to her. We've integrated that book in 2019. It was a company initiative. And I think it fits perfectly with what we do with safety and health that there's four quadrants of communication.
And if you read through the book and you go through all four quadrants, I'm sure you'll be able to relate-- the audience out there will be able to relate to those four quadrants. The sweet spot that we want to be in is that top right quadrant where you care personally, you challenge directly. And until you work on creating that-- because you're not always going to be in there. You're not always going to be in there. Many times, we're passive aggressive in construction. It's kind of just part of how we roll on jobs and in organizations.
But for striving for radical candor where we really talk about what's really going on. And it's hard to do. And we have how many conversations a day? We're going to have 50 to 100 conversations with people today, maybe a couple hundred. How many of those are we radically candid? So the single most important thing is to be radically candid with each other and organization and really share what's going on and really talk about how hard it might be to improve some of this stuff.
I mean, these aren't easy things we're talking about. There's a lot going on every day on jobs across the country. And communication is the key. Working together is the key. And the more radically candid you can be, I think the collaboration level increases, it gets higher. And that's really the ceilings we're striving for is to enhance collaboration.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, thanks. I'm certainly on that personal journey myself to strive towards radical candor. And so I found the benefits obviously are not just in the workplace. Those permeate then the rest of your life. When you've got that ability and courage to speak candidly and to speak confidently, again, it not only changes the tone and tenor of the conversation, it changes the outcomes pretty dramatically, again, not just in the workplace, but also in your personal and private life as well.
Again, Paul, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your insights today. Any final comments that you have that you'd like to share?
PAUL LEVIN: No, it's great to be here. It's great to talk about our safety program. We're all on this safety journey together. Each one of us might be at a different mile marker on our journey. Our companies might be at a different mile marker on the journey, and there might be at a different mile marker on different issues like we talked about earlier, whether it's type II helmets, whether it's measuring high energy.
I think it's great that we can all work together and share best practices and be open about it. And I'll tell you, I think probably the best thing all of us can do is to start measuring everything. Start measuring every unplanned event in every energy exchange and really evaluate what happens at your organization. There's no way we would have thought five and a half years ago that we'd have 76 incidents that someone could have been seriously hurt or injured. And here we are, five and a half years later, and 15% are still high energy.
I will tell you that we've gone from a 5% rate of controls and safeguards in place to 52%. We're going to strive for 100% for sure. We all need to start measuring everything to really understand the risk of our business so we can all work together to get those direct controls and safeguards in place.
And until then, I'm not sure we're going to get this fatality rate moving down as fast as we want it to. But I know that if we do start measuring everything and having these radically candid conversations, we can drive this fatality rate down because there's no reason for that rate to be stagnant. And think we owe it to ourselves and the industry to keep working hard at it.
TONY MILITELLO: Well said, Paul. Thanks. Again, thanks for your time. And with that, back 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 and follow the show.
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