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About Me

I am currently a Regional Safety and Health Professional for CGB Enterprises, establishing and maintaining EHS programs for fifteen facilities. I graduated from Murray State University with a Master of Science in Safety Management and a Bachelor of Science in Occupational Safety and Health. Previously, I served as a Graduate Assistant in the Occupational Safety and Health Department at Murray State and completed internships for three Fortune 500 companies.

Managing safety is really about managing people within an organization. The key to achieving success in any business initiative is to communicate the 'Why' in a way that speaks to their hearts and minds – and that goes for all people in your organization, regardless of what level they are in. It was this approach that helped former ALCOA CEO, Paul O’Neil, use safety as a lever to successfully drive organizational change in the 1980's. This premise still works today. When your organizational goal is to send people home safely to their families, you’re effectively speaking to the heart of the "why" in a way that all people in your organization will respond to.

The physicality of oilfield, construction and other labor industries are often a determent to health and fitness. They consistent of long hours and increased levels of stress.

Researchers are finding that employees who worked more than 40 hours a week were significantly more likely to be obese. In addition, overweight and obese works were 26% to 45% more likely to experience injuries. As supervisors and safety professionals, it is so important to relate to the worker and help change behaviors.

Hi! I’m Abby Ferri, the President of The Ferri Group LLC. I have over 14 years of experience in the field of safety and health in diverse industries including construction, manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, beverage, and retail.

Hi everyone! My name is Mario and I am a registered attendee for Safety 2017.

About me

I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico with my beautiful wife, Lauren and our three dogs. I’m the Corporate Safety Manager at Souder, Miller & Associates and have been in my position going on three years. When I’m not working; I enjoy reading, traveling, lifting weights and being outdoors.

Session 590 presenter, Ron Gantt, Safety Differently: A New View of Safety Excellence, appears in the May issue of Professional Safety Journal “Unsafe Behavior: Rethinking the Concept”

The top citations have stayed consistent. Session 720 on June 22, Process Safety Management Best Practice Safe Work Permit Management System, is an opportunity for safety professionals to review safe work practices for permits used in hot work, confined space entry, non-routine work, and working at height.

OE problem solving methodologies and techniques have historically been utilized in the manufacturing environment to identify defects and eliminate waste. Those same OE tools have proven effective at Coca-Cola to identify and eliminate 'safety defects' (unsafe behaviors, near misses, incidents) within an operational process. these concepts have also been used at Coca-Cola to address opportunities related to Safety Maturity and Culture.

The safety-minded organizations who plan to adopt ISO 45001 will be looking for concrete methods to demonstrate their commitment to continually improve their company's health and safety culture in line with the new standard. Intelligently designed ANSI/ISO safety sign systems will be an integral part of an ISO 45001 risk communication/risk reduction strategy, to communicate residual risks to workers, subcontractors and guests.

Earlier this year, I started a position as an Occupational Health and Safety Specialist at the University of Chicago, so Carol Schmeidler’s, MS, CSP, knowledge and experiences at the University of Buffalo will benefit fellow safety professionals at college campuses. She will be presenting Safety on College Campuses – Significant Challenges and Opportunities.

Imagine changing your mind-set to view your biggest challenges in ways that encourage collaboration across your organization—something affectionately dubbed "the gift of Vision 20/20," by highly-evaluated conference favorite, J.A. Rodriguez Jr., CSP, SGE.

As adults, our injury frequency drops dramatically from our childhood, so it is natural for us to feel that we are "safe enough." Complacency often plays a significant part in injuries. As safety professionals, we want to efficiently minimize the effects of complacency.

Any professional in the safety, health, loss control, or risk management field will have significantly more success in their career if they are comfortable, engaging, and persuasive. How exactly do you achieve buy-in from employees and management, and become a trusted adviser?

Does your organization have any type of fleet or employees using their own vehicles for company business? If so, you need to understand the gravity of the potential costs involved and learn the steps to immediately minimize exposures.

Five Tips to Help OSH Professionals Make the Big Switch

This article was first distributed in Professional Safety in November 2016.

To see the full article with images, charts and figures, click here.

ISO 31010, Risk Assessment Techniques, lists Bowtie analysis as a simple diagrammatic way of describing and analyzing the pathways of a risk from hazards to outcomes and reviewing controls. It can be considered a combination of the logic of a fault tree analyzing the cause of an event, and an event tree analyzing the consequences.

Many organizations market goods and services – they have a strategy around how they place their product or service and even give it a brand identity. What if we were to take this same approach and apply it to our safety programs?

Former ASSE President Trish Ennis, M.S., CSP, ARM, CRIS, is presenting the pre-conference seminar, “Strategic Thinking for Excellence in Safety,” at Safety 2017 this year.

As the title of Ennis’s seminar indicates, strategic thinking is vital in safety today. However, challenges can come when trying to get executive support. “When we talk about strategic thinking we are talking about looking at the overall context of the organization and identifying the initiatives you are trying to implement that are in line with the goals of the organization,” says Ennis. “You may want to look at the strategic plan, vision, values and goals of the organization and see if you are pulling your initiatives in the right direction. If you understand that, the financials and some of the challenges, that will make you more successful when you implement your programs and policies.”

Advances in safety theory are shifting our understanding of how workplace accidents occur, and directing our focus away from blaming worker behavior, and instead focusing on improving conditions, systems, and processes relevant to the work environment. Establishing effective safety and health goals to improve our systems is critical to maintaining my organization’s capacity to perform work in a safe manner. To accurately measure the level of safety within an organization, safety professionals need to record, measure, and analyze the activities that "create" safety on the shop floor. When injuries occur, we must embrace that failure, recognize the system weaknesses and identify meaningful and impactful ways to improve our safety systems and processes.

In the past, industries claimed they didn't realize what they were emitting into the air, waterways and ground and the effects it would have on our environment. Abandoned industrial sites and misused landfills are still being cleaned up by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) "Superfund" program. There are approximately 30 Federal Acts that pertain to environmental affairs based on air, water and land.

My name is Willie Sease and I’m really excited about attending the conference this year. I have attended the last three as a student and will be attending as a practicing professional.

I find the professional development at ASSE top notch, especially the annual conference. I wanted to share my passion for ASSE and safety by becoming an ASSE Ambassador. I learn so much and make new connections each year. Plus, it’s a great feeling to be around so many people that are safety professionals.

No one knows if leaders are born or made, but leadership is a requirement in the safety profession. Julius Rhodes, SPHR, has been an ASSE annual conference favorite for the last 15 years, presenting on various leadership topics.

As safety and health professional, we sometimes struggle with how to identify lone workers in the workforce or how to control the hazards they face through written safety policies and procedures or emergency management plans. As the internal and external threats to employees change, the identification and classification of who is a lone worker also changes. The lone worker is no longer confined to those working in hazardous situations or with hazardous materials, but can affect personnel in a wide range of industries such as municipalities, manufacturing, oil and gas/pipeline, utilities, agriculture or schools.

Causation is multi-dimensional, nonlinear and difficult to predict. Even when using the "5 whys" approach in root cause analysis, we are not able to identify most of the true, underlying factors that influenced the situation. In some cases, designing or engineering out hazards to acceptable levels of risk is considered cost prohibitive. Thus, prevention activities focus on procedures, training, protective equipment, signs and warnings, and other less reliable controls. Because of this trade-off, we have not eliminated the hazard nor reduced the level of risk. However, we are required to conduct the investigation, determine the root cause, and evaluate appropriate corrective actions.

Behavior-Based Safety, is the most commonly used process to obtain improvements in injury reduction. Its core components are so powerful that it is hard to imagine how it won't get great results. Per Bill Sims, failures and lukewarm BBS systems have these in common: 1) You didn't do your homework; 2) You bought off the shelf, not customized; 3) Too complex; 4) Your leaders weren't involved; 5) You didn't know when to ask for help; 6) You don't know how to deliver feedback, recognition and celebrate success.

The oil and gas extraction industry continues to experience an elevated fatality rate. One of the most troubling aspects is the role of fatigue, particularly as the industry continues to experience the detrimental impacts of competitive business demands on safe behaviors at the individual and organizational levels. While API 755 FRMS focuses on sleep/shift, it does not address the high physical and cognitive demands that workers encounter.

OSHA’s landscape continues to evolve, whether its recent changes in areas such as recordkeeping, increased penalties, post-accident drug testing, whistleblower investigations and temporary employees, or leadership changes underway in the new administration. Many of these changes present employment law landmines that we, as OSH professionals, need to recognize so we can help our employers strategically navigate to avoid mistakes.

In early 2016, Millennials (ages 18-34 in 2015) surpassed Baby Boomers (ages 51-69) as the nation's largest living generation. This is a dramatic change for Baby Boomers who have long enjoyed an outsized presence and influence compared to other generations. This is particularly true in the workplace, where each generation’s differing perceptions, values and interests come into play each day. The media has often characterized these differences as significant, saying these two generations can’t coexist and have a very challenging time working together.

Many of us spend hours on the road, whether it’s driving for work, running errands or taking a driving vacation. It’s easy to take the roadways for granted as we move from one destination to another, but the reality is many thousands of workers are involved in building America’s highway infrastructure and keep them safe while also keeping the travelling public moving is an inherently risky activity. This becomes even more challenging the in face of dwindling funds.