Category: News

Robert Emery, Vice President/Professor at University Texas, delivered a workshop around “Health and Safety’s Role in Mitigating Insider Threat Security Risks”

While organizations maintain many layers of controls to prevent outsiders from gaining unauthorized access to cause loss or harm, persons who have been granted legitimate access can become an “insider threat”, and because they are very difficult to detect, cause over $100 billon is losses annually. Although the typical insider targets assets or data, in some cases their actions can also have significant impacts on workplace and environmental health and safety. Because much of an organization’s health and safety program activities are carried out with the workers in their workplace, this represents a unique opportunity to assist in the possible detection of insider threats. This presentation will discuss the threats represented by insiders and will detail their recognized traits so that health and safety professionals can enhance their situational awareness and report suspicions to the appropriate authorities.

ABOUT ROBERT EMERY
Dr. Robert Emery is Vice President for Safety, Health, Environment & Risk Management for The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Professor of Occupational Health at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Bob has over 30 years of experience in health & safety and holds master’s degrees in health physics and environmental sciences, and a doctorate in occupational health. Bob is unique in that he possesses national board certification and registration in seven main areas of health & safety.

Wesley Witt, Director of Quality & HSE North America at Siemens Gamesa delivered a workshop around “Social Media Platforms and Behavioral Influence for Improvement of Proactive Safety”

One of the many challenges in safety management today is how to influence culture, safe actions, and decision making in an open loop system with employees spread across the country. Basically, the challenge is how do we get people to make the lower risk decision when nobody is looking and free will is the biggest influence in the room. This means effectively influencing employees to act with the core values and expectations communicated to them from their leadership when they have the choice to take safe action or look the other way. The key is utilizing a page from the playbook of social media platforms and consumer influence and apply this to safety management to influence behavior and decision making. If Starbucks can influence millions of people to stop for a coffee because they watched their friend check into Starbucks on Facebook, then we can use the same concept to drive employees to take safe actions to mitigate risks or hazards with social influence.

ABOUT WESLEY WITT
Wesley is currently the director of the quality management and environmental health & safety for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Service North America. Wesley has more than 12 years in the energy service industry in quality and safety management from the project level to executive management. Wesley has been implementing human performance and resilience engineering practices into Siemens energy service operations in 2008. Wesley has a patent pending with Siemens for a Resilience Management System process to manage risk and error likely situations to reduce safety and quality loss to organizations. Wesley has authored several articles on resilience engineering and human performance practices and received his master’s degree in Safety, Security and Emergency Management from Eastern Kentucky University.

Fred Bonewell, Chief Security and Safety Officer at CPS Energy, delivered a presentation around “Generation Y & Safety”

Many of us in the workforce who provide training today went to school at a time when the teacher was the “source of knowledge”, putting facts on a blackboard with students copying the text and then being tested on their recall of that knowledge. The generation joining the workplace for the first time now were not taught at school like this, and don’t expect to be taught at work like this. Generation Y (and Z) , which includes anyone born after 1980, were taught using active, participative methods. They were expected to research facts for themselves, and the younger millennials watched YouTube videos for homework. Instead of essays, they made papier-mâché models of cells for biology, and videos about climate change for geography. Understanding how to strive to obtain ZERO HARM with the Generation Y employees calls for a particular style of learning and leading.

ABOUT FRED BONEWELL
Fred Bonewell Chief Security & Safety Officer at CPS Energy as a direct report to the President & CEO he oversees all of CPS Energy’s Enterprise & Public Safety, Cyber & Physical Security, Fleet Operations, Business Continuity, and Labor Relations. As a result of a behavior-based safety program, the company continues to experience a reduction in employee accidents through the promotion of safety awareness. A similar approach is being implemented externally to encourage safety among contractors as well as customers.
Bonewell has more than 30 years of progressive leadership experience in employee health and safety, risk, workers’ compensation, and labor relations. In 2016, he was recognized by the National Safety Council for Distinguished Service to Safety. He has worked for Louisville Gas & Electric, Florida Power & Light, and Enel Spa based in Rome Italy.
Bonewell is a graduate of Indiana State University.

David T. Loyd, Assistant Director, Safety & Mission Assurance at NASA Johnson Space Center, opened the second day of the OHS Leaders Summit USA with a presentation around “Risk Tolerance and Safety Culture: Minimizing the Risk of Catastrophe by Bringing the Lessons of Space Home”

Safety and health excellence isn’t just about preventing mishaps and optimizing performance, it is about anticipating failure and accepting a reasonable potential for error. What is common across all industry is human error. NASA has learned from our experiences how the human condition paired with flawed organizational factors can lead to catastrophe. Learning hard lessons have contributed to evolving NASA’s risk appetite and creating an environment permeated with risk-based thinking. Ultimately this helps us in pursuing an effective safety culture that minimizes risk and encourages mission success.

ABOUT DAVID T. LOYD
David has a broad background in aerospace management, operations, and testing, specifically directing occupational safety and quality assurance functions. He has focused much of his career on management system implementation and measurement, having assessed several NASA Centers and government installations for both occupational safety and quality assurance program effectiveness. David also has successful experience sharing training programs with management, technical, and academic audiences on a variety of occupational safety and risk management topics.

Marty Stern, Director, Health and Safety at Colgate Palmolive Company, delivered a roundtable on “Shifting Focus to Reducing Fatality and Serious Incidents (FSIs)”

Over the years Colgate-Palmolive has evolved to have Global recordable and lost workday case rates that have reduced consistently year-in, year-out, positioning them as a leader among peer and benchmarked companies. Unfortunately, fatality and serious incidents (FSIs) have not declined, but have remained flat, and in some instances, increased. In order to minimize FSIs, Colgate has shifted focus to critical risk reduction. Several programmatic changes have been identified to raise awareness, mitigate risk, and focus on the incident types that can contribute to FSIs.

The roundtable discussion covered how we are transitioning to an FSI reduction strategy, while still maintaining focus on our strong foundation of minimizing all incidents. The audience discussed strategies their companies have taken to reduce and mitigate FSIs, and strategies they are using to minimize the impacts of exposure to critical risks.

ABOUT MARTY STERN
Marty currently serves as Director, Health & Safety with Colgate-Palmolive. In this role he is responsible for the development and implementation of all Colgate global health, safety, and industrial hygiene programs and standards. His primary focus in this role will be to establish foundational programs to minimize and reduce critical risks. He serves as the interface to external health and safety groups to benchmark and identify best practices. He also has Divisional EOHS responsibilities to support Colgate’s Latam Division. Previously, he served as Associate Director, EOHS and Sustainability for the Americas’ Divisions. His leadership has helped develop a formal linkage between the two divisions, and align on key EOHS priorities and initiatives. EOHS performance for the two divisions has seen continued improvements for critical EOHS KPIs during his tenure. He has been with Colgate for over 18 years in various EOHS and operational responsibilities in manufacturing, R&D, Corporate, and the commercial side. He has been responsible for establishing a number of key initiatives and programs that have helped to deliver sustainable performance, while instituting strong foundational programs in culture and risk reduction. This has helped reshape Colgate’s approach to EOHS processes and management systems. Additionally he spent 9+ years with AT&T in a variety of EOHS responsibilities, and 2 years environmental consulting. He co-authored Applications and Computational Elements of Industrial Hygiene, a textbook that has been leveraged for graduate and undergraduate industrial hygiene courses.

Walter Fluharty, Psy.D., SPHR, CEES – VP – Environmental Health and Safety & Organizational Development at Simon Roofing and Sheet Metal Corp, delivered a roundtable presentation on “The Prescription for Success”

A lively roundtable discussion of the importance of understanding your safety culture to allow for the full and effective facilitation of safety initiatives.

At the end of this session you will walk away with:

• A basic understanding on how to capture the perceptions of cross section of employees.
• Have a new tool for making informed decisions on where to place resources to obtain optimum results, visibility and worker buy-in.
• “Lessons Learned” from other organizations that can be leveraged for success.

ABOUT WALTER FLUHARTY
Dr. Walter C. Fluharty is currently the Vice President – Environmental Health and Safety & Organizational Development for Simon Roofing and is responsible for their manufacturing facilities and 66 Service Centers nationwide. In a career that spans more than 30 years, he has built a reputation developing world class safety cultures in a wide variety of industries. His experience includes developing the widely used training program, “It Can Happen Here” funded by an OSHA New Directions Grant. He actively participated in the development of several OHSA standards including, the Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals and Cadmium standards.

Allison Montgomery, Senior Director EHS at Harris Corporation, presented a workshop around “EHS Management Systems”

This workshop session touched on how EHS management systems indicate culture, how to get executives to continue to invest in managements and how to operationalize management systems.

ABOUT ALLISON MONTGOMERY
Allison is the Global Senior Director of Environmental, Health and Safety for Harris Corporation.  She is based at Harris’ Corporate Headquarters in Melbourne, FL and is responsible for developing strategies to improve the company’s overall Environmental, Health and Safety performance.

Tiffany Felix, VP, Global Corporate Services and Enterprise Risk & Compliance at Oakwood Worldwide, delivered a presentation around “EHS…One piece of the Enterprise Risk Management Puzzle”

Through this interactive exchange, Tiffany discussed EHS as a component of Enterprise Risk Management and the other aspects of ERM to round out a full framework.

ABOUT TIFFANY FELIX
Tiffany Felix is Vice President, Global Corporate Services, Enterprise Risk and Compliance for Oakwood Worldwide. Leveraging her extensive experience in global risk management, she oversees several key functional areas including enterprise risk, business continuity, crisis management, insurance, compliance, and legal.

Patrick Hudson, Professor at Delft University, and Tim Hudson, Partner at Hudson Global Consulting, delivered a presentation around “Living the Dream: What Does it Really Take to Get to Zero?”

Patrick and Tim discussed about achieving stellar safety performance and how it takes more than just concentrating on what goes wrong but also requires more than an aspirational mindset about primarily concentrating on what we can do well.

ABOUT PATRICK HUDSON
Patrick is a psychologist with wide experience of safety and management in a variety of high-hazard industries. Patrick has worked with the Oil and Gas sector, both upstream and downstream, commercial and military aviation, shipping, mining and hospital medicine. Patrick was one of the developers of the Tripod model for Shell, together with Jim Reason and Willem Wagenaar, better known as the Swiss Cheese model. Patrick was part of Shell’s team developing the theory of SMS in response to Piper Alpha and am now involved in teaching and developing SMS concepts in Civil Aviation, primarily in Asia and Australasia. Patrick developed the HSE Culture ladder, together with Dianne Parker and is now working on improving concepts of risk analysis in hospital medicine, transferring knowledge and experience between industries. Patrick is an Emeritus Professor at Delft University of Technology in The Human Factor in Safety at the Department of Safety Science.

ABOUT TIM HUDSON
Tim Hudson is a global thought leader in risk management and risk culture. Tim is currently engaged in developments in risk space and cultural theory understanding. In addition he consults in a range of industries including aviation, oil and gas, mining, and healthcare, where he has helped create true change within organisations as a partner at Hudson Global Consulting. A background in theoretical physics and business management enable a unique perspective on the challenges of modern operations.

Rob Fisher, President and Director of Operations at Fisher Improvement Technologies, presented a workshop on “Advanced Human and Organizational Performance – How Personality Impacts Managing Risk”

An interactive session that touched on the most advanced science-based information and methods related to Human and Organizational Performance (HOP and HP) and specifically the importance of managing personality tendencies when managing risk.

ABOUT ROB FISHER
Rob Fisher is currently the President and Director of Operations for Fisher Improvement Technologies (FIT), a Native-American (Cherokee) owned business that was recently awarded a Top-100 Native-American Owned Business in the US and a Top-50 Emerging Business in North Carolina by DiversityBusines.com. Rob has extensive experience in performing incident analyses, designing performance improvement systems, designing and improving corrective action programs, designing and running procedure programs, and educating staff from the senior leaders to the field. He is a sought-after mentor and trainer, and is routinely invited to speak at international, national and regional conferences on safety, procedures, performance improvement, human & organizational performance and incident analysis. FIT has most recently been recognized internationally as instrumental in reducing fatalities and serious / life-altering injuries in high hazard industries using human & organizational performance and procedure concepts.