58. Best in Class Safety Culture with David Abkmeier

Andrea and Griffin are joined by David Abkmeier from West Bend Mutual Insurance to chat about a best in class safety culture, three points of contact, near-misses, and being mindful of the work in front of us.

Also: Don't let your trucks idle!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Loaded, the Han Ready Mix podcast with Andrea Meyer and Griffin Hahn.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

How's it going today?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Great. Although it's raining.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

It is raining. It is raining. Uh also today we have a special guest, David Abkmeyer. Did I say that right? Yes. Awesome. Excellent. You just told me and then not my skill set is remembering how to say names correctly. Sorry about that. Anyway, from West Bend Insurance. So yeah. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Great. Well, should we dive into some uh announcements first?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Yeah. Uh real quick, today's a good day to remind everyone about not idling trucks in the yard. I know we called a lot of people in today because we had a lot of work lined up and things are on hold and stalling out. So there's a lot of trucks sitting in the yard, several of them for more than 45 minutes at a time with the engine idling. And we've we've talked a lot about the price of diesel and the you know how it affects the performance of the truck. So I think it's it's very easy to say if you've been sitting in the yard for 10 minutes, turn the truck off.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

No matter what.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yep. Please. And you switched your uh email notifications because you're flooded, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Thousands of emails. I couldn't, I lost control of my inbox because of how many notifications I was getting at a at a lower level. So now I'm only seeing the ones that are over 45 and it's still so many.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

It's giving me an idea to like find like really repetitive things.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

And just blast me with them.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

And find like set you up to get an email every time.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

No, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Yeah. I was thinking like every time we get a raw material delivery, just send a ticket to no.

unknown 1:45

No, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Um also Tiffany Johnson, our new uh payroll person, started this week. Uh she's just so excited to be here. She's learning as much as she can. She's actually doing payroll this week, her first week with. Yeah, wow. Marla watching over her shoulder. So we're really excited for her to get started. She has also taken over that payroll cell phone where you can send text messages or call for questions. I'll just give everybody that number again, one more time. It's 563-726-9638, and that will go straight to Tiffany.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Excellent. Yeah. Welcome aboard, Tiffany. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

We should invite her to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

We should. That's a great idea. Let's we'll do that soon. Let's let her get her feet under her a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Let her get a weekend.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah. She's going to listen to this on Monday and be like, oh no. Not come back to work. I'm done here. Okay, great. Well, I had just one announcement. Of course, since it's March Madness season, I have to give our weekly update. Now, by the time this comes out, it'll be a little out of date because the final four round has will have been done. But essentially, uh, we've really narrowed the field. Currently, there's a tie at the top of the 63 brackets. It's Brian Stelley and Eric Van Spraybruck from Rouse are tied.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

This is embarrassing. This is almost as if you were winning. It's like the only thing that would be worse than the IT people beating our whole bracket. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Well, they and the crazy thing is they have the same picks from here on out. Oh. If they win, either they're winners or they're losers. Yeah, they'll they'll tie and we'll have to go to the tiebreaker. Um but anyway, some quick scenarios. Uh if Yukon wins it all, Zach wins it all, which is great. I mean, really, he's a guy that's known for his basketball knowledge. So I think that that's good. So if Yukon wins it all over Arizona, Matt Brill from Centennial will get second. If Yukon wins over Michigan, uh Mark Debbler will take second. If Arizona wins, then Brian Stelley and Eric von Spabrok, uh, they tie. And uh same thing if Illinois wins and over Arizona. So if Arizona does well, that's good for those two. If Illinois wins over Michigan, Carol Morrissey will win and Mark Debbler gets second. Same thing if Michigan wins over Illinois. And then if Michigan wins over Yukon, Mark Debbler will get first with Kale Morrissey second. So there's only, I don't know how many people that is, uh five or six people that are still alive. So but appreciate everybody that participates. It's always fun.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

All right. Well, David, should we jump into this? Yep. Excellent. So, real quick, just give us your background, um, you know, how long you've been doing this and and what is it that you actually do for West Bend.

unknown 4:36

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

I have been with West Bend for going on 12 years now in their loss control department. And we are a new partner with you as of January 1st. Yeah. Hopefully a long-term partnership. And my role is what I like to say the fun part of insurance. Okay. So going out and working with all of our clients in my territory. Yeah. I see a variety of different industries from your type of industry, ReadyMix operations, construction contractors, to a lot of other uh type of industries like manufacturing and transportation, trucking, school districts, uh restaurants. I mean, you name it. We I pretty much even like wide MCAs and uh senior living. So that's what makes my job fun is getting to work with all different kinds of industries and all different uh kinds of folks in those industries. And what I do as far as loss control is uh really being kind of a uh, I like to say a trusted advisor to um help you folks to look at where there's more likelihood of having incidents, whether it's uh motor vehicle related with your trucks or employee injuries, um, anything related to your overall operations in the property. And what's the likelihood of an incident happening in any of those areas and how well we control the likelihood that something might happen, like an employee injury, and to help you try and look for opportunities to minimize the likelihood of that happening, looking at your trends of the incidents that you do have, and again, looking at opportunities coming out of those trends. Um, providing any sort of resources, training, you know, that might help to get us to a point where we're able to mitigate or or limit opportunities for incidents.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Yeah. That is that actually does sound really interesting to do that with a bunch of different industries. And I'm sure you get to see a lot of really cool stuff behind the scenes on how different companies operate. And you got to think that would lead to a lot of kind of broad lessons to learn, you know, uh that you could apply for all your your clients, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:53

Yeah, the one of the the fun and challenging parts of my job is just all the technical knowledge of just learning over all those different industries.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:03

I mean, there was a point, obviously, I came into the career without knowing a whole lot. Yeah. And so over the 12 years here, I built up a lot of of knowledge and technical, more technical expert expertise, but I still learn something almost every day, it seems like. And and in a lot of it's because I have the opportunity to work with so many different types of industries. And even within the same industry, there's unique differences uh between you know one company and another. So getting to learn is one of the more you know fun, yeah, cool parts of my job.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, we appreciate you coming and we're about constant improvement around here. So if there are areas where we can do better, especially from a safety standpoint, then you know that's that's really important to us. And we want to make sure that we are learning from those lessons and and implementing, you know, changes and and policies or or whatever else keeps our people safe.

SPEAKER_03 7:58

So I think the key word you just mentioned there is learning. Yeah. And to me, that's just what um sets best in class apart from the rest is taking the opportunity to learn and improve.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

So when we talk about our industry specifically, what do you see? You know, obviously there's vehicle incidents, right? But from like a safety injury standpoint, what's the most common type of of injury that that affects our our industry?

SPEAKER_03 8:34

Probably the the employee-related injuries. So, I mean, it can be related to driving the vehicles. You know, we have a lot of that going on in the operations, but also just doing the parts of the job, whether it's at the poor site, getting out of the truck, uh slip trip and falls. Slip trips, falls, yeah, you know, handling the chutes, cleaning out, uh washing out the trucks at various times, back in the shop, you know, when you're working on trucks, so you know, a lot of different moving parts going on there and opportunities for you know, struck by or getting caught in between equipment or tools, things like that. So yeah, there's you know, there's a lot of lot of different things going on and a lot of opportunities for for work-related injuries.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah. I think a lot of times we you we hear the slip, trip, and fall is like a category, right? They that's that's how the insurance industry categorizes right those types of injuries. And it sounds so innocuous, right? A slip, trip, and a fall is something that, you know, I've got a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and we have a slip, trip, and a fall every 30 seconds at my house, right? So uh it's it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, right? But, you know, when we look at our incidents that happen, that's that's always such a big bulk of it, and they can be serious, right? Right. So, like what do you guys see? Is that is slip trips and falls, is that like uh the the top of your list on things that you guys try to manage or mitigate, or how does that stack up?

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Obviously, it depends on the industry, but with that being said, almost every industry sees slips, trips, and fall injuries and claims their number one or two or three even. Yeah, but most common their number one loss driver.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:27

So, and that has not changed really over the years. So it's it's gotten better, yeah. But and it, you know, it varies, you know, between companies and and from year to year. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Safety Council keep track and data of slip trip fall incidents, not only at work, but also just in general. And the NSC most recent statistics shows there were around 40,000 deaths a year from slip trip and falls. Wow. So within the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are about 844 work-related fatalities annually. Wow. So across all industries.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

I mean, those are heavy numbers.

SPEAKER_03 11:18

I mean, that's and those are just fatalities. They're not they're not the number of injuries. Right. There's lots of different, you know, injuries from very serious to very minor as a result of slip strips, falls.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

So yeah. So as we think about that in our organization, what is the the top things that we can do to to try to prevent that from happening, from having those, those incidents?

SPEAKER_03 11:42

Well, we always talk about when we look at how we control our exposures, like slip, strips, and falls, is a hierarchy of controls. Not to get too technical here, but the best way of controlling an exposure is to remove it altogether. So any opportunity to reduce how much we have to get in in and out of the vehicle, um, how high we have to work and limiting the the height working from heights, those are engineering controls where we're eliminating fully or partially the exposure. And then you get into more administrative controls, which is more how much exposure do we have to slip, trip, and falls? Can we reduce it? Can we change it through things like I don't know, job rotation? That's more of an administrative control. And then we we look at PPE, things like footwear, look at equipment as far as hand holds and steps in the trucks, hazard assessment in your your yard, yeah, material that might be on on the ground that could lead to a slip chip fall or things like that. So there's there's kind of different ways of of trying to limit or mitigate or reduce slip chip falls.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And we talk a lot about those hazard identification things. And a lot of times we are beholden to the manufacturers of the equipment we are purchasing, you know, to have the the correct handrails or footing or or whatever. But we have a great team that is able to add things. If if any of our folks are, you know, working on a plant or something and say, this is just doesn't feel very safe right here. I wish there was another railing or a better place to stand or whatever. Then but most of the time we can figure out a way to do that to make it safer. And and we have you know, OSHA inspections and things like that that you know that certainly look for ways we can improve that as well.

SPEAKER_03 13:44

But I think again, what what I think is best in class is just a culture that is encouraging, receptive, and open to suggestions from anybody, especially those that are doing the job day in and day out. Yeah. So you know, and being able to encourage when when you see something or you you think of something or an opportunity, you know, from your daily job that you do every day that you think could make it better first and foremost for yourself, safer for yourself as well as co-workers and for the company as a whole, you know, do we have an opportunity to bring that up? Yeah to communicate that.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

We love that. We just talked about that last week on the podcast. We had a few different people, you know, as they're coming back from seasonal layoff and getting back to work, there's things that, you know, changed over the winter or needed, you know, to be fixed. And we love to get personal feedback from people who are doing the job about how we could make it easier and safer.

unknown 14:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Yeah. Awesome. I think there's also, you know, the process element of it, right? So like things like three points contact and and making that like this is uh something we drill into everybody, like this is how we get up and down a ladder or step in and out of the truck, that kind of repetitive motion or it's as natural as putting your seatbelt on, right? And and if we can train for that, I think it really drives you know the results on on preventing things like falls off the truck, right? Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:10

Yeah. Well, one thing we did that I am excited about is we provided some stickers to put on the vehicles and it says three PC. And so it's a visual reminder because I think that's a good thing. And it's there's some contrast to it. So they're green, you have red trucks for the most part. And so, and you put them in the right places so that you look at it every time you you get back in or get get out. And you know, it could be on the door, it could be on the back where you're climbing up to the to the hopper or wherever you're doing the majority of your climbing during your job. And again, it provides at least a visual reminder. I think you you know brought up a key piece, which is the training piece of it. And, you know, that's that's the proactive time of hire and you know, how frequently, I mean, you can never really train, I think, enough. I mean, as long as it's the right, you know, way of training and delivery, the just having different ways of training so it doesn't get monotonous and repetitive. But so, you know, I think those are all key factors to the concept of maintaining the three points of contact. Uh you mentioned that, you know, it is it is just part of our our normal routine to a point where it it you don't have to think about it or you just do it so much during the day that you tend to not put a whole lot of thought into just getting it up and down from the truck or up and down off a ladder. And that's those were there's opportunities to become more complacent, to maybe go too fast, to take shortcuts, you know, that we need to look at how can we try and get you back to thinking about things that you don't have to think about every day. Uh just uh be more mindful to and that's where the visual reminder maybe helps a little bit. Sure. And to just, you know, slow down. And you know, I don't think there's a real reason to to rush getting up and down off of uh out of the truck, in and out of the truck or off the ladder for the sake of saving a couple of seconds.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Right. Do you think that's why sometimes people don't do it or you think it's just rushing and hurrying? And I mean, we we like hustle around here, but not at the expense of safety, right? So do you think that's the biggest reason why people don't do it sometimes?

SPEAKER_03 17:35

I I think it is a key factor. Yeah. Is just yeah, rushing speed kills kind of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

So yeah, I think sometimes it's a habit the wrong way too. A lot of times I'll see people get out of the truck facing out instead of turning around to go down, so that it's it's harder to hold on with two hands when you're when you're getting out that way. Turn around to go down, and then three points of contact is is where I'm at with it.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

So much so that I would say that to my kids when they were little at the playground, like to go down the slide. They always, or even to turn around and go down the ladder down the slide, they always go the wrong way. So I they know that saying now too. But also, I think what's happening more and more, hopefully not at work, but what I see is people are always holding on to their phone or something. Or you know, sometimes at work it might be a ticket or the hose or something. So you're trying to climb up and one hand is unavailable because you're holding on to something. So figure out how to do what you need to do with whatever you're holding on to, and then do your climbing up or down, whichever one it is.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

That's a great point. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

I agree. If there's any way to be able to transport something like a phone or uh anything else that if we have a way of carrying it without holding on to it. Yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Great. What do you you kind of talked before about best in class? What else can we do like as a company to separate ourselves? Because we do want to be best in class, right? We do want to have a safety record that we're proud of that not only saves us money, but attracts people, like that, hey, we want to go work at Hon ReadyMix because we're not going to get hurt there, right? Or they're going to take care of us and give us the the training, the tools, the the environment where we're not going to have an injury and we get to go home the same way we came to work. You talked about training, but what what else can we do to be that best in class?

SPEAKER_03 19:32

We also looked at or we I talked about how looking at trends and trends could be not just things that lead to actual losses or claims. Uh, but you know, we've all heard near miss.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:48

So looking at that up, that's a real best in class thing is is looking at how do we capture near misses. Because oftentimes near misses can be ignored. You know, we don't bring anything up until we have to. Sure. But there's lots of near near-miss opportunities every day. And you know, it's fostering a culture where we're encouraging looking for those near-miss opportunities that we can then investigate along with the incidents and do a really good job at really drilling down into the root cause of whatever happened or whatever didn't happen but could have happened. And then looking for an opportunity again to using that hierarchy of controls, can we eliminate this? Can we modify it to reduce the likelihood of it or protect you know with a uh last line of defense PPE kind of situation? Sure. So I think that that's a really critical opportunity for to work towards or maintain your best in class.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

And I think that that is something that um we probably could focus more on. We we certainly have near miss reports and we we do and have taken them seriously, but I'm I'm also pretty certain there's probably near misses that don't come to us, right? That we can do better and gathering that and treating it like an incident where we say, okay, how how can we prevent this? What can we do differently? And and so I would encourage anyone listening to this that um if you do have a near miss, you know, it's not it's not filling out a form to fill out a form, right? It's to, you know, if you almost got hurt, it's to save the next person in that situation from getting hurt. However, we have to capture that information, just come talk to somebody, right? We don't want to make it like some onerous process that people don't want to do, but put it on.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah, sometimes it's just as simple as bringing it to someone's attention, like, hey, this tool is broken or this isn't working the way it should, or I almost hit this. You know. Something like that. If if it was a close call for you, there's uh likely you know new guys who are starting or or different things that happen that we want to make sure we're taking action on it as soon as we notice it.

SPEAKER_03 22:11

Yeah. And a near miss, if it happens over and over, is eventually going to lead to an incident. Yeah. It's just a matter of time. Absolutely. The other thing I I just wanted to mention was just a more positive approach to safety. And I mean, I think we're doing that right now. Yeah. Right. And so and anytime we have an opportunity to recognize and celebrate safety and and really make it a real positive part of the overall culture of the company, rather than it just being something that feels like it's required because of OSHA or you know, because we we just it's a normal expected part of operations.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

I think it's yeah, I think I find it really interesting. Through my career, we've gone through like multiple safety transformations. So uh I'll tell you when I started here, safety wasn't something that we talked about a lot. And we knew that that was a problem. And so we tasked uh a safety manager at the time to to really crack down, right? To really make a change. Uh and and we went so far that he was like hiding behind trees on job sites and stuff. And and uh it really was kind of almost like a gotcha environment, right? Like we're gonna catch you doing something wrong so we can punish you. And while that was effective at making people aware of the behavior change that should happen from a morale standpoint and buy-in standpoint, that wasn't you know the the right way to go about it. So I do think then we we've evolved from that um into you know this the proactivity and doing things like this and and more training and and uh more kind of open communication. And I think that that's um that's been I think neat and beneficial to see the that transformation. And I think it's borne out in our experience, right? With how many injuries we've had and the severity of those that over time that is that has improved markedly.

SPEAKER_03 24:12

So yeah, I mentioned building that trust, and I think that's how you build trust is making it a a positive part of the job where you're more likely to hear somebody report a near miss or you know really be a uh a part of the accident investigation process, which they you know, anybody that's directly involved in an incident ideally is is a part of the investigation. You know, they're kind of the the go-to almost for you know what happened specifically in this case. And then, you know, the more we have a open, you know, receptive, trusted environment, the more the better information we're gonna we're gonna get.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

So absolutely. I think it's important to underline again the why of all this. Like we this first and foremost always is that we want everyone to go home the way that they came to work. I hope to never in my career have to call up an employee's family with some terrible news or or anything like that. And I don't ever want people to be impacted with an injury or whatever long term and or or even short term. We want to minimize all that that ever can happen. So that is first in my mind all the time. And uh, but even beyond that is the financial impact on the company, right? So insurance is a um a huge cost for a company like us. We have all these trucks out driving around, you know, and and so obviously the less incidents we can have, the safer we can be, then the less our insurance costs, right? And the more we get to spend on new equipment or um, you know, bonuses and things like that. So all due respect, we'd much rather give our money to our employees than give it to you guys, right? So uh we that's our that's our goal with this as well, is is there's that kind of economic aspect of it too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:03

And I want to be a partner with Han ReadyMix to to for this to be a win-win. Yeah. Um exactly. Because that's you know, ultimately we want you to pay as little as possible on premium and us.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Well, if we do well, you do well too. Right. And yes, yeah. Us have to pay as little as possible in crazy costs.

SPEAKER_03 26:23

So and you know, again, that's kind of the fun part of my job is to um help. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Well, I think it's cool, you know, a lot of times profit and morality don't always point in the same direction, right? And I think it's the the one nice cool thing about this scenario is yes, we want to save money, but it's in we'll save money by people being safer and by not having injuries, right? That's a that's a good thing, a great thing in and of itself, right? So it's I like that they are parallel benefits, right? And so you don't have to be bad be feeling saying, like, I hope we save money from injuries, because that would mean there's less injuries, which is the number one goal. So I really think that that is neat how those parallel in this situation.

SPEAKER_03 27:07

Yeah, if we if we're not seeing, if we're not having a lot of claims, again, we do have, you know, the the the near misses that are potential claims.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:16

But we're doing something right. Yeah. Right. I mean, uh that that's a a pretty clear indication of how well you're doing at least prevent preventing things from happening. So, you know, and and I think you've talked about just the direct costs like cost of premium, yeah, but also the there's so many intangible indirect costs when it when it comes to to safety, as far as first and foremost, the quality of life of your employees. So, you know, again, like you said, we want them to go home. Yeah. And not just go home, but be productive and happy and do whatever they normally do with regards to hobbies and family life and personal things. So that's then also, you know, looking at the long-term effect of injuries and you know, the impact on on being able to do to have that good work life balance, be able to maintain your ability to to to work, to make money, to to live.

SPEAKER_02 28:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:21

And then also just the impact on overall company operations, replacement costs for somebody that's that's hurt, replacing equipment, company rep reputation, you know, the pride of of the organization, you know, as being a best in class in the industry. So there's so many different beyond the direct costs.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Well, we're getting up there on time. So let me ask you one last question. If there's one thing that you want to convey to all of our employees listening to this that can make the biggest difference, what what would that be?

SPEAKER_03 29:00

Without getting too deep, I guess just being mindful. You know, today is today and you're not getting it back after it's over, right? And I think we just we we spend so much time thinking about other things, either in the past, which we can't change, or in the future, which you know, we can prepare for. But we also need to live today. We need to focus on what we have going on today, whether it's while we're at work or once work is over, then hopefully, you know, we're safe to go home. That because we were safe at work, we're we're able to go home and and uh in the in the way that we want want you to. So just just being mindful, being paying attention to what's going on right now and you know, taking your time. I mean, taking the time that you have to do a quality job.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yeah. Nothing we do is so important that we have to hurry to the point we're being unsafe to do it, right? We can take the time to do it safely, always. So yeah, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I hope this was uh a fun experience for your first time on a podcast, right?

SPEAKER_03 30:09

Yeah, it was yeah it was great. And I appreciate the opportunity. And cool. It's great I was able to do it here and get this one under under my belt, and hopefully I come back some other time.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

And you'll be uh going around doing some observations of some of our people. So hopefully you'll have some feedback on some ways that we can improve. So looking forward to that. That'd be great. So thanks again. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to Loaded the Hon Ready Mix podcast. Share this episode with your friends. Stay safe and shut off your truck.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

See ya.