Safety Factor: How To Start An In-House Safety Program

Intro

(high-energy rock music)

– [Announcer] For your own safety, you are reminded to stand behind the yellow line.

(siren rings)

– [Ben Hengst] Welcome to Safety Factor. My name is Ben Hengst and today we’re talking about how to develop your own in-house safety program. I’m joined by two safety experts from Mazzella, Alana Cohen, safety coordinator, and Kevin Paul, Mazzella’s director of safety. So Mazzella really takes safety seriously. It is one of the company’s core values, and as such, the in-house safety program that Mazzella has developed is pretty important. I assume it has gone through a pretty big evolution throughout the years, and I wanna find out more about that, but first I’d like to hear a bit more about you and how you got into your roles as leaders in safety.

How do you get started as a safety coordinator?

– [Ben Hengst] So can you tell me a bit about your journey throughout your career?

– [Alana Cohen] I’m pretty new to safety. I’ve only been doing it, probably about, mm, four years now. I kinda just fell into it by chance, ended up going to school for it. I’ve done a lot of site safety out in the field, especially in the phosphate mines, and been with Mazzella almost a year now, next month will be a year.

– [Ben Hengst] So what brought you into safety?

– [Alana Cohen] I’ve grown up in the scrap business, and I used to work for my dad’s scrapyard, and he needed somebody to start doing safety, so I got picked for it, and I didn’t really know a whole lot about the details to a lot of safety. I mean, we never had our own safety program there. I’ve had other safety programs from customers that we did business with, especially demolition work. I kinda had to learn how to have the, how to make the programs and things like that, so ended up just going to school for it.

– [Ben Hengst] And how’d you end up at Mazzella?

– [Alana Cohen] I was doing site safety at Mosaic, at one of our big customers. It was contract safety work and the contract was coming to an end. It’s kinda hard to work for family, so I was ready to move on from the scrapyard, and met some of the technicians from Bartow that were out there working, by chance asked them, “Hey, are y’all hiring?”

– [Ben Hengst] And Kevin, how about you, how’d you start off? How’d your career get rolling? – [Kevin Paul] So I’d been with Mazzella a lot longer than Alana. I actually interned here back in the day, so I worked in the shop. I was making a lot of the wire rope slings, doing a lot of the proof testing, doing some material handling, and then I kinda just stayed with the company as I graduated and kinda grew with the company. I’ve kinda dabbled with quality, lean manufacturing, IT, business systems, and then probably about six, seven years ago, the company then decided, hey, we need to make safety more of a dedicated position. They reached out to me and thought I’d be a good fit. I didn’t have much experience in it, but I knew what I needed to do or who I needed to learn from, so they helped network me with some people and I kinda grew from there. I really like working with people, it’s kinda what drew me into the safety aspect. I like trying to make a difference, send people home to their families and friends, and it just, it’s kinda been something new each day. It’s not repetitive, there’s a whole lot that comes up, whether it’s a customer site you’re visiting for the first time or something new you’re producing in-house, it’s been neat.

– [Ben Hengst] So what drew you to safety, like what pulled you into it?

– [Kevin Paul] I kinda just saw the way the world was going and I saw a big opportunity with companies making to safety. I saw it kind of on our end with, whether it be our service crews going into certain sites that have a lot stringent programs in place, and then I kinda saw, you know, some of the stuff we’ve had take place in our respective companies and kinda what that could do to a business, where we might have some gaps, and kinda, I saw an opportunity to make a big difference.

Why do you need an in-house safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] So why should a company have their own in-house safety program? In your opinion, is it necessary? What are the benefits to it?

– [Kevin Paul] It’s actually a requirement from OSHA, so like the Occupational Safety Health Administration. But that’s not why you do it. I mean, OSHA’s just kinda, it’s, they’re the minimum requirements. You do it because it’s the right thing to have. Like you wanna be able to have your coworkers feel safe, your team members go home in the same condition they arrived to work in. And there’s a lot of like T’s you gotta cross and I’s you gotta dot to get to that point, and there’s an investment from the company to go down that path.

How do you start a safety program in a family owned buisness?

– [Ben Hengst] So Alana, you started off working with family, so how did they get their start? How’d they decide that you were going to be the safety person?

– [Alana Cohen] Well, I got volun-told that that was gonna be me. (laughs) So we were doing, we did a lot of demolition work alongside the scrap, started getting some really big customers that required to have a safety person with them, so it kinda started from that. We had to first build a, we had to get a safety manual. The scrap industry’s a little bit different than what we do over here at Mazzella as far as small groups. OSHA doesn’t really bother them so they don’t push all the rules versus some larger companies, so when we started dealing with the larger companies, we had to start having those manuals and the representations and things like that. My dad knew I would be good at it. It’s something, the nice thing about what we do is it’ll always be there, we’ll always have a job. Somebody will always need safety, whether it’s keeping them safe or they’ve had an incident that they need to fix, and so kinda, he saw an opportunity for me to build a future and for the company to be able to build, so it kinda worked out for both of us in the end.

How do you grow a safety program alongside your buisness?

– [Kevin Paul] It’s kinda neat too, like being able to explain like why we do stuff, or why things have to be done a certain way, ’cause it’s the world we live in, but like for those that, you know, it’s not their primary, you know, thing that they do, day in and day out, you kinda gotta relate to them and understand, like hey, what’s a practical way of going about this but making sure it’s the right thing we’re doing? So like, it kinda goes back to like keeping stuff as simple as possible and standardizing it, and that way it’s, you know, as the company grows, so too can the safety program and every program there for that matter.

– [Alana Cohen] I think I was, I think my background too has helped me come over here and help like the technicians and stuff understand why they need to do things a certain way, because I’ve been on the other side. I’ve been in the field just like they have and the same places that they have, so I think that’s helped kind of bridge that gap too, ’cause there was a lack of safety for a little while and we’re definitely making some progress here.

– [Kevin Paul] And to follow that up, like yeah, like you’ve gotta build that relationship, like you can’t say, “Hey, come to me or ask me,” and you know, and then not get back to them or not be able to support them. Like you’ve gotta be able to answer their questions or let them know that you’ll get back to you with an answer if you don’t have it right then and there. And I think that’s where like the relationship grows, and it really does start to take shape, and people start to own more of it and feel more comfortable coming to you with stuff you want them to.

– [Alana Cohen] It’s not been easy, I mean we’re still struggling trying to get everybody onboard with doing certain things, but we’re getting, we are making progress with it, and they are starting to understand and they appreciate the fact, if we don’t know the answer, we just tell ’em, “Hey, we don’t know right now, “lemme look into it,” instead of either acting like we do or just feeding them something that’s off the wall.

How to deal with pushback against safety regulations

– [Ben Hengst] Do you find you get a lot of pushback from people, being the safety guy who’s telling everyone how to do their job and how to be safe?

– [Kevin Paul] I’d say we get, not a lot of pushback, but yes, pushback, I mean it’s in anything, like people are gonna question like why you have to do something, and that’s why I think it’s important, like the messaging that you put out there, like here’s what we need to do, but here’s why we need to do that. Like we’re not just doing it because, you know, some regulation says that, we’re doing it because the regulation says that because there’s been a huge emphasis on amputations in the industry, or there’s been a lot of fatalities that have kinda led to something like this, so it’s like, you’ve gotta kinda understand, like hey, just because something happened, something hasn’t happened to us the last 20 years doesn’t mean we’re not susceptible to having it happen to us tomorrow. So kinda using the whole continuous improvement model, which I know Mazzella’s a big advocate of, and we’ve got, you know, a quality team in-house that they focus on continuous improvement, but understanding, we’re always trying to get better, we’re always trying to understand which hazards there are, we’re always trying to control them, offer up solutions.

– [Ben Hengst] Okay, so you said

What are the requirements for a safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] that having an in-house safety program is required by OSHA, so what are the requirements for an in-house safety program, and then what do people do to achieve this? What does it take?

– [Kevin Paul] So like the big thing is, you’ve gotta identify what you do. So like, you kinda get the scope, here’s what our business does, what it entails, and then you’ve gotta have documentation that kinda goes along with that. You’ve gotta have training that goes along with it, and then you have to have audits in place. So like OSHA, again, they lay out like the minimum standards that you need to do, like hey, training needs to be done every 12 months or before you start or every three years,

Why is in-house training so beneficial?

– [Kevin Paul] but the in-house program has to make it suitable for your environment. Like if you’re doing material handling, whether it’s by crane or forklift, like you wanna make sure the people that are operating those are competent in that landscape. So like if you have a warehouse, you wanna make sure they understand how to navigate that warehouse. If you have to load and unload storage racking, like you’ve gotta put your eyes on them, and they need to understand how to do that specific task in your environment. That’s why like a lot of people try to send people to outside locations for training, which is great, I mean, but it’s also most beneficial when you can put your own eyes on them and put them through your own experiences in your specific environments. What do you think, Alana?

– [Alana Cohen] I agree with you. We try and do as much in-house of the training as possible, for multiple reasons. For the one, we know exactly what they’re getting, and we can kinda gauge the information that they need or don’t need, and we can see how they react to it so then we know how to, what does or doesn’t seem to work for the future with trainings.

How can a company start their in-house safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] So how can a company start their in-house safety program? What are the first steps that they need to take to get going, to get the ball rolling?

– [Kevin Paul] So like the big thing that we did, we kinda said hey, all right, we do these 25 things, let’s just say. And we started kinda making a list, and then we looked at any like incident trends that we might be able to have visible to us, so whether it’s OSHA logs, claimant information from your insurance provider, try to get an idea of a, what’s happened in the past that’s caused some ill will for the company or the employees, and kinda say all right, is there any easy items to attack, like low-hanging fruit, like hey, do we need to get clarity around this type of equipment, or we have a gap with understanding on how to operate X, like, so you kinda look at kinda what’s been happening that you can to improve that going forward, and then also like what we said earlier, what else do we do that maybe we haven’t had incidents with, but we wanna make sure the new people we bring on tomorrow have the same understanding as the person that’s been doing it for 30 years.

– [Ben Hengst] And Alana, what steps did you have when you starting off with your family, getting their safety program, how’d you get it going?

– [Alana Cohen] We worked with another safety company that that’s pretty much what they do. Now they’ve added in trainings and things like that. They kinda helped us build our safety manual, helped us build a safety plan. We took a lot of resources from customers that we were dealing with and kinda adapted some of their policies and just changed it to what we needed, like with JSAs and things like that.

– [Kevin Paul] Yeah, and to your point, like we brought in our insurance providers, and we did walk-arounds with them and they did risk assessments for us, and they kinda helped, yeah, call attention to stuff that, again, we can put action around to improve going forward. So like insurance, worker’s comp, safety, your network, outside consultants, those are all good tools to kinda have in your back pocket to help you improve.

Can Mazzella help you start your safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] And does Mazzella help get things going? Do we do training and things like that for other companies that might wanna get started?

– [Kevin Paul] Absolutely. It’s more of like a niche though, like fall protection, Mazzella can come in, provide you training, do a working at height risk assessment, you know, rigging inspections, we’ve got a full staff team that can go on site and they can look at all your slings and rigging, overhead cranes, again, we can inspect, train you, troubleshoot, we can kinda help you with any of those areas, storage racking is becoming more and more, we can help provide you safe solutions so you can store what you need to. So yeah, Mazzella’s, just like other third-party consultants, like Mazzella’s a good company to use to make sure you’re having a safe workplace.

How does a safety program grow and develop?

– [Ben Hengst] So how has Mazzella’s safety program changed and grown over the years? Walk me through, like from when it was a little baby to what it is now.

– [Kevin Paul] So one of the neat things to kinda see over the years transform is just how it’s become more of like everybody’s vocabulary, so we do daily huddles or weekly meetings, whether it be technicals or touches, and now it’s, safety’s kind of a topic or a component to those type of meetings, so it’s kinda neat to hear like, you’re not waiting for, you know, the month to finish to hear if hey, we had any incidents or not. It’s, we’re finding out that day or the next day, here’s what we had happen, here’s what we did to correct it, and then we can share that information across the growing network. The other thing that’s kinda been neat is the company recently adopted safety as a core value, so you know, we always say like, we’re humble, we’re hungry, we’re smart, we want lifelong learners, well now we wanna make sure safety’s at the forefront of that value as well. So just kinda, whether it’s new hires, job descriptions, interviews, it’s kind of something that we’re inquiring about ahead of time, making sure it’s a proper fit for our growing team.

Why does safety need to be a core value?

– [Ben Hengst] What drove that? Why now? Why is now safety a core value? Or has it always been and we just never said safety is a core value?

– [Kevin Paul] I think it’s always been but it’s never been said, and I think now that it’s in writing and we can hold people accountable to just that, like, “Hey, are you doing safety first?” Like, “Are you sacrificing something to get the job done? “Well you can’t sacrifice safety.” So I think it’s kinda, it helps with the accountability piece from a peer to peer.

– [Alana Cohen] Seeing that we have had instances over the years, just like any other company’s going to have, and once it starts to, when you start realizing that it’s affecting you with customers, it’s affecting you with different things, you know, insurances and whatnot, you realize, okay, maybe we need to make this a little bit bigger. I think it’s always been a thing, but now it’s even bigger, and now we’re bridging that communication gap too which has helped tremendously to make safety be pushed to the front.

How can you build your in-house safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] So as companies start small and they start growing their safety program and becoming bigger, how can they move forward, like are there certifications that they can get? Like what can they do to grow their safety programs from beginning to like building it into something important that they really focus on?

– [Kevin Paul] So yeah, there’s lot of, like you said, certifications, there’s a lot of accreditations you can get, you know, as a company. You can, OSHA has like a Voluntary Protection Program that they can put in place. So like I recently just got my Certified Safety Professional, credential I guess, but what that is is like a full-time safety professional, I’ve got the necessary, you know, understanding. Basically I had to pass a really tough exam to do that, so it was a lot of studying, study time leading up to a lot of outside training, but the other thing the company’s done is we now have like OSHA 10-hour training available to employees, so like specifically on the crane service tech side, like any new hire that starts, we’re putting them through that accreditation, so they’re getting OSHA 10-hour certified. We’ve got a lot of individual trainers that like take place, whether it’s with Mazzella and ITI to become a certified rigging inspector, an overhead crane inspector, operator training. I know Alana’s working on her OSHA 30, right?

– [Alana Cohen] Yeah, it’s 30 long hours.

(all chuckle)

– [Kevin Paul] But there’s a lot of stuff, like the company’s investing in lifelong learning being a core value, like hey, we’ll support you, reach out to what you need to to continue your growth with the company and make us a better program.

– [Ben Hengst] And Alana, the same for you, like how did you grow the safety program, both before with your family company and then how are you growing within the program now, here at Mazzella?

– [Alana Cohen] I think I’ve grown a lot more over here.

– [Ben Hengst] Why is that?

– [Alana Cohen] Honestly, when you remove that family dynamic, it just, your whole mentality changes, and I think I’ve just done a lot better, I’ve grown a lot here in many different ways but definitely with safety. I’ve learned a lot more about safety here. Doing my OSHA 30 like Kevin said, I ended up getting my degree in safety. Maybe one day I’ll do my CSP, but I don’t know, it’s a lot to take in.

– [Kevin Paul] And seeing like the technicians or the managers interact with her, like she’s gotten their respect, like she said,

How to win over the employees out in the field

– [Kevin Paul] in less than a year, and that industry, it’s not easy to, you know, say that for everybody, so I think it’s a testament to her and like she’s very practical. She’s willing to do the right thing, but also, you know, not try to put a bunch of red tape around something that doesn’t need red tape.

– [Alana Cohen] That was definitely something that took a while, because it is a different crowd dealing with the technicians. They’re, they are, they’re tough guys, they’re the best, great, love ’em all, but they are, they’re tough and they’re very close-knit, and when they see an outsider come in, they’re kinda like, put the guard up, but then when they see automatically that your title is safety, then it’s, you know, double the wall, so it took a little bit to break through, and once they realized that, I mean, I’m not just a pencil pusher, I’ve worked right outside with them plenty and they realize that they can trust me and I’m not there to safety cop them, because I think safety copping is by far one of the most counterproductive things that you could do in safety, and I understand that sometimes, you know, you have to do some, I don’t wanna say questionable things, but there’s like things that like, okay, let’s talk about it and see if there’s a different way to come around to do it, to get the job done than just allowing them to do whatever they would’ve done in the past, but instead of just going out there and barking orders and, “No, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that,” when you talk to them and say, “Hey, let’s figure out a different route, “there’s gotta be a safer way,” whatever it may be, they change their attitude and they’re like, “‘Kay, no problem,” and nine times out of 10, we find a different route and everybody gets to go home, all fingers and toes and limbs and happiness.

– [Ben Hengst] So how do you win ’em over?

– [Alana Cohen] Oh, sometimes you just really gotta put ’em back in their place. They, I’ll tell anybody, they’re the type of guys that if they’re not hassling you and talking all the crap to you, then they don’t like you, so if they know that you can dish it back to them just as much they can give it to you and you know, you keep it within a box, then you’re fine, and they just, I just had a really, tried to build their trust. It was not easy. I didn’t let them get away with just whatever, but I didn’t nitpick them either, I think is more, it’s honestly, it’s how you talk to them. If you talk to them like the adults that they are, then you usually don’t have an issue. It’s, they have the issue when people come out there and bark the orders or try and tell ’em, this is how you’re supposed to do it when they don’t know how to actually do it, they’ve never done it a day in their life. These guys are working long hours, they’re hot, they’re tired, they’ve been away from their families, they don’t wanna be pushed around. They want, if you have a problem, let’s talk about it, and it helps. So once they realized that about you, they’ll do anything for you.

– [Kevin Paul] Yeah, the communication is huge.

How to get other leaders involved in the safety program?

– [Kevin Paul] The other thing too, like how it’s kinda changed and grown over the years is like the vocabulary has shifted a little bit from like what we’re measuring, like you know, it used to be like hey, what’s your OSHA incident rates? What’s your experience modification rating from your insurance provider? It’s like, that is a lot of lagging stuff, like you need to know, but you don’t really wanna like harp on it ’cause it’s so lagging, so like we’ve shifted a lot of people to like the leading indicators, like hey, what are we doing from inspections or auditing or training, or you know, behavior-based recognition? Like how can we start measuring more of that and making sure we’re doing what’s right to prevent this stuff from happening? So like we’ve kinda increased our audits, and again, it’s not an Alana and Kevin thing that are doing all these audits, it’s usually the site lead or the manager, and they’re kinda doing a self-reflection, like again, we’re not trying to say you gotta be 100%, but we’re trying to call out opportunities where improvement can take place. So is there equipment that needs to be modified, maybe an extension cord needs to be scrapped and replaced, or we’ve gotta improve the guard that’s currently on a piece of the machinery, I don’t know, and making sure we’re looking at who’s qualified to operate certain types of equipment. So we kinda use these audits to kinda self-improve, and we’ve kinda kicked that up a notch from where we were years ago to where we’re at currently.

– [Alana Cohen] We try and have the managers make the audits be a positive thing. I tell them, like you don’t need to just do a surprise attack on your crew and, ’cause that doesn’t always work and we don’t want it to be a negative thing at all. Hey, take ’em out to lunch if you have time. Spend a little time with them, especially, I know definitely on the crane side, a lot of these technicians, I mean just here in Bartow, we have, I don’t even, close to 30 technicians, and maybe 10, 12 of ’em come to the shop. Half of ’em live in the north part of the state, the other half life in the south part of the state, like they’re hours away, so you know, you may not get to see them, so go there, spend a little bit of time with them, you know, get to know your guys. We don’t want it to be just, okay, well I’m here to look at this, this, and this and, you know, get you in trouble, like we don’t, we really try to stress that with about the audits, and so far it’s been a positive reaction.

What advice do you have for others who are starting their safety program?

– [Ben Hengst] Any mistakes or lessons you learned along the way, getting our program started? Any wisdom you would like to give to others that, so they don’t make the same mistake?

– [Kevin Paul] Try not to find fault in everything, but like, you know, hey, thank you for, you know, wearing your seatbelt when you’re operating the forklift, or good job handling that load, you know, low and slow, or I see you were 100% tied off the entire time, like I feel like we’re starting to do a little better job. We’re not certainly there, but we’re doing a better job kind of calling out the good along with, you know, where we can improve.

– [Ben Hengst] So carrot and the stick situation.

– [Kevin Paul] Yeah, right. Especially in our world, you only hear about like stuff usually when it goes wrong. It’s refreshing to hear about all the stuff that’s going right, you know, like–

– [Alana Cohen] They, I feel like they do better or wanna do better, like the technicians, and not even just technicians but people in general, they wanna do better when they know that there’s some type of reward for it. It could be something as a “good job” or a pencil that says Mazzella on it. They don’t care what it is, they just want somebody to tell them, and ’cause that happens a lot and especially in big companies, they’ll tell you everything you’re doing wrong, but they never tell you anything you’re doing right, so sometimes a little, “Hey, you’re doing great today, “good job,” you know, that goes a long way and then it’ll encourage them to keep doing better.

– [Kevin Paul] ‘Cause like, and that’s been, when we have like an incident, like we’re never trying to say like, it’s so-and-so’s fault or they’re the blame. It’s always like, all right, here’s what happened, usually it’s a process breakdown, it’s like what are the corrective actions we can learn from there? Like we’re never trying to like, let’s fire this person because they reported an incident, there was an incident. That’s not the right way to go about it. You wanna make sure you have care and concern and you wanna find out the root causes, ’cause a lot of times it’s stuff out of the person’s control, and we wanna make sure we hone in on that and we kinda commit to, all right, here’s what we’re gonna do by X date, and we’re gonna share this information with anybody that may be impacted. So I think that’s the other thing kinda from the company’s side is, you know, we’re not looking to throw somebody under the bus. We’re looking to get everybody on the bus, so. Do you like that analogy?

– [Alana Cohen] I like that analogy.

(all laugh)

– [Kevin Paul] Use your gut feel, like a lot of times too, like, ’cause sometimes it is, it’s, stuff is gray, it’s not always black and white, but like, you kinda gotta ask, is this the right thing to do? Like, you know, and work as a team, like nothing’s ever so important that you can’t stop and call somebody and get clarification around something, so I think that’s like the big thing is like, understanding like, hey, we have time. Like just because you’re at a customer or in front of somebody right then and there doesn’t mean you can’t stop and take the extra couple seconds, minutes to make sure we’re all on the same page. And I think that’s kinda taken me a little long time to understand is like, you know, it’s okay to say, “Hang on,” or “We’ll get back to you,” or “I don’t feel comfortable doing that right now, “let’s wait ’til we, you know, get clarification “from the customer or the manager or the end user, “let’s wait ’til we get a different piece “of equipment in place.” So I think understanding, and like the company fully supports it is, hey, we’re willing to, you know, spend the extra five, 10 minutes, whatever it takes, to eliminate the shortcut that might get us in trouble.

– [Alana Cohen] I think the fact that our guys know that we do take care of them, we don’t treat them like a number, I mean Mazzella’s a massive company, very easily we could all just be a number, but it’s not like that here, and some of them have come from companies where they were, so they were afraid to say, “Hey, this isn’t safe, lemme stop this,” or take that extra five or 10 minutes ’cause they knew that there’d be some type of repercussion, so I think that the fact that they know that that’s not how it is, that’s not gonna be the Mazzella way whatsoever, you’re not gonna just be a number, even if there’s a million of you, you’ll never just be a number. We want you to have that relationship with us and with your managers, whoever, ’cause when they think production, production, production and not safety, that’s when you just start having problems.

– [Kevin Paul] It used to be hard to get people to like do a safety talk with their team, like a toolbox talk, like just kind of, hey, take a topic and communicate to your team, ’cause we didn’t have a whole lot of managers in place and we didn’t have the dialogue or the platform for them to share it, so it’s like, it’s kinda been neat to see that evolution to where like now there is, yeah, like the managers and their teams are speaking and they’re going through a topic, they’re, hey, this is how it pertains to us, here’s what we need to do to control this, and you’re kinda getting that clarity, and it’s kinda been refreshing to see, or people ask, like hey, you know, do you have anything on this topic, you know? It’s gonna be 98 degrees here in the next week, like do you have some stuff on heat illness or dehydration or heat stress? Like instead of us kinda always just pushing it, it’s kinda like been neat to see the pull happen from certain spots.

– [Ben Hengst] So before where people were putting up walls, now they’re actually requesting.

– [Kevin Paul] Right, like hey, do you have more, or what about this situation, like we wanna make sure we have clarity around this topic. So it’s, it is, I think to what we said earlier, we’re finally getting some, you know, good relationship building and people wanting to use us knowing that we’re not trying to be a safety cop, we’re trying to be a safety support system.

– [Alana Cohen] They’ve been really patient with us too, ’cause they know it’s just us right now, and we’re trying to take care of all the locations, which, and it’s a lot, especially when you’re spread across the country and I’m in Florida, Kevin, you’re in Ohio, and what about the people way out in Colorado or, you know, we don’t want anybody to feel forgotten so we try and really keep that open line and check in with everybody.

– [Kevin Paul] And I mean, the last couple years didn’t do us any favors with the pandemic, ’cause we’re all learning like what to do through all that, so like, you didn’t wanna table stuff, but there were certain things that we kinda had to put on the back burner until we could kinda get the other things more in line. So that’s kinda just the message for the safety professionals is, or the companies, you know, be flexible, ’cause stuff’s gonna come up that you don’t anticipate, and you’re gonna have to react, like when we have a hurricane potentially going through the state of Florida, like certain things are gonna have to give and take to make sure, you know, we’re ready for certain hurricanes or natural disasters or situations that kind of beyond our control.

– [Ben Hengst] All right, thanks guys for joining us. You can get ahold of myself, Alana, Kevin, or any of our other experts at MazzellaCompanies.com. Don’t forget to pop into our Learning Center, we have a ton of information there. Subscribe to Safety Factor wherever you listen to your podcasts, or you can watch it on the Lifting & Rigging channel on YouTube. Thanks for watching or listening, and stay safe out there.