Let me begin by clarifying the premise of my editorial article, safety does not stink. However, as a safety professional I can testify that for many this is the attitude towards safety directives in the field. Many operations personnel in our industry assume that safety people are either actively working against them, or at best, “just doing their jobs.” Candidly, we haven’t figured out how to get out of this two dimensional box and in many cases have built its structure ourselves. One of my goals is to clarify where we’re failing and strategies to leverage these failures into a new paradigm. One where our workers see safety leaders as coaches and partners, not police and tattletales.

As a fourth generation energy worker, I grew up with stories of valor and pickles my grandfathers and their coffee shop crews (as I call them) endured when they were still young enough to throw a chain. These guys were tough, and a lot of them got hurt. At the time, it was part of the culture. They grew up as farm kids working around machinery and driving grain or beet trucks at the age of seven. They breathed risk and chemicals, and pretty much every other particulate or gas that went airborne. Times were different then and a lot of our systems, data, and education have improved our workers longevity and quality of life, but the way these initiatives have been managed hasn’t always built trust with the people we ask to implement them.