How to Set Up Systems for Success: Ergin Akbaş on HSE and Systems that Work for the Frontline

You are listening to the Safety Heroes Podcast, the podcast where we delve into the world of safety professionals and explore the critical role they play in ensuring every human goes home safely. Our guests are the unsung heroes and natural leaders of the safety space. If you're in the safety space or have no clue what happens in safety functions, this podcast is for you. Join us as we celebrate these heroes, hear their stories, and discover the human side of safety and make sure, it's constantly evolving for the safety of our people. My name is Moussa. I'm the founder and CEO of Pixera and your host for these episodes. Because when it comes to safety, every hero deserves a voice. So welcome to the Safety Heroes Podcast.

One of the sayings that I continually use is compliance is the floor and risk is the ceiling. And really, we need to break through that ceiling Earlier in my career, I worked with the contractor world, right? So that was our department where we did major projects. And I've always said to our contractors, I said, I'd rather spend time with you upfront before the construction starts, before the project starts, to orient you, to give you an orientation, to give you all the information rather than you having a major incident later on and, you know, stop work for 2 months because, you know, you don't have your safety act together. But spend that time upfront to invest some time. To really have a plan in place to manage risk.

Ergin, how are you, my friend? It's super good to finally meet you. I know we've been connected a while back now through our friends Gokhan and Evren. So, I'm excited to be having this with you finally.

Yes, Moussa, good morning and good afternoon, maybe in your case. I know you're over in Europe. I wish we did this in person, but really, really glad to be here. And, you know, I have to say, I've been an avid listener of Safety Heroes podcast. You've had an amazing lineup. I think the first episode was related to L'Oréal. People like Malcolm, Bridgette, Gökhan, some of the names that come to mind, and just great content and very authentic. So, you know, really thank you for setting the stage for people to share their stories. So I'm really excited about today.

Really appreciate that feedback. Honestly, it's been a passion project and it's helped me learn a lot and build really good relationships within the industry. So I appreciate the the feedback. And yeah, honestly, super excited. I know you've been in the space for such a long time. You have a very interesting career. You're currently in the EHS function at a senior role in Avangrid, which is like a super interesting and fascinating business in the US. So if you can just take a step back and help us learn more about your background and your history and how you got here, that would be awesome.

Yeah, absolutely, Moussa. So I have a lot of stories when it comes to safety. It's definitely— I think I see a lot of parallels between you and I as far as passion goes. The way I got introduced to safety is, you know, I went to school for civil engineering. So, one of the things that they drilled into our head is that the structures that we were building was, they had a number one role, right? Meaning we were making sure that people were being safe, whether if it's a bridge, building, and whatnot. And not only humans, but also environment as well. So, it was definitely instilled in my head. But when I started in Avangrid, this was 13 years ago now, we built one of the largest wind farms in Massachusetts at the time. And there, when I came to realization that safety is really integral in everything we do, whether if it's in construction or other industries. So that's where I got introduced to a safety role. And in the last 10-plus years, you know, I've been involved with building different systems. Initially, it started with quality management system, But really at Avangrid, we, you know, we, we started with environmental management system back in 2014. Over the years, we worked to really expand the scope of that management system. So as far as Avangrid goes, you know, we, we are, we are helping drive the clean energy transition in the US with presence in 26 states, more than 3 million customers, being at that capacity and really being being able to serve our customers, uh, with 8,000 employees, we need to make sure that, you know, we have a structured framework to manage our employees' safety and our stakeholders' safety. So, um, that's kind of a quick snapshot of, you know, how I got introduced to safety.

Yeah, that's awesome. And when you think of AvantGrid and when you say energy transition, what does that really involve? So what does a typical project look like? And, and what are the typical risks you're navigating around?

Again, Avangrid is the US, uh, company of the Iberdrola Group. So Iberdrola Group is one of the largest energy companies in the world. So in the US, we have basically two different parts of the business. One side is the renewable side, where we build and operate, uh, renewable energy farms, so wind farms and solar farms. And most recently, you know, we built the one of the first wind farms in, in Northeast, Vineyard Wind Farm, in offshore. So as far as the risks are concerned, when we're building those wind farms and solar farms, those are large projects, right? Definitely from logistics to bring those wind turbines to site, definitely before putting them up, you know, there's some foundation work that goes into it as far as, you know, there's excavation, there's blasting. In some cases, we have to pour concrete. And when we are lifting those huge parts of the turbine, there's a lot of risk associated with that, right? So you're lifting heavy equipment, you're dealing with wind, you're carrying these components, you know, sometimes up the hill. In all different type of settings. That's construction. Beyond construction, you know, we have more than 75 sites across 26 states, as I mentioned. So to daily maintain and operate those wind farms, you know, our technicians climb up to those windmills, go into the nacelle, go into the hub, and they, you know, from ergonomics, from fall from heights, definitely electricity, right? We are a utility company. So those are definitely the higher risk. Same thing on the network side. Network, so what is that? What that is, is on the Northeast, we have 8 operating companies where we are responsible for transmitting and distributing energy to our customer base. So the 3+ million customer that I mentioned is on the Northeast and across the 4 states. So that's both gas and electric. So from risk perspective, I mean, our higher risk is definitely electricity, you know, fall from heights,, and there are other risks associated with our line of work, but we are definitely in a high, high-risk industry, from a safety perspective.

Yeah, it's super interesting. Honestly, I always find the renewable sector super interesting and fascinating. I think we might dig into a few things just to kind of learn from your experience, but, but yeah, to take a step back and just continue again, your introduction, your specialization now within the business is on EHS.

Management systems particularly? Yeah, Musa. So it's one of the things that, you know, for me, it's definitely a journey, right? There's no destination with this. So, you know, when you tell people about management systems, their mind straightly goes to, okay, what is the name of that software? What are you doing? So one of the things that, you know, I have to continuously do is to say, It's not this magic machine. You know, the, the, the, uh, definition of a system is when many of the different components work together. So what that means is that, um, I think a lot of the companies, you know, they roll out EHS programs, you know, month after month, and then flavor of the month, and then, you know, they will kind of be defragmented, right? So the system, the EHS management system, what it does is It puts a structure and framework around not only our EH&S programs or, you know, managing safety risk, managing environmental risk, but really integrating it with the, with operations, with, with business. So I'm familiar with, with the ISO standards, right? ISO 14001 Environmental Management. And I've definitely dealt with the OSAS standard when it was around, OSAS 18001 and 45001. So just a quick overview, the way that the framework is set up is it starts with context of the organization. And what does that mean is that, you know, what is the scope? What is your system going to achieve? You know, who are your stakeholders? And then moves into a thing called leadership commitment. So when I say a system, right, if you don't have the commitment from leadership or if you don't have buy-in from workers, you're kind of dead in the water. So you have to make sure that you get the leadership support, they have the buy-in, and then our workers, same thing, they're bought into this idea as well. And if we continue to move, if you can visualize this, you know, we call it the, you know, management system wheel, the next step would be planning. So planning entails, you know, you set your objectives, you know, it's around the PDCA cycle, plan, do, check, act. If you don't have any plan, you don't have your compass to go on this journey. And then it goes around and then talks about training, talks about communicating, and also consultation and participation with our workforce, which, you know, I was looking at some of the work that you worked on. It's called the 2025 HSE Playbook. And, you know, some of the things that I saw in that playbook, definitely, you know, what stood out to me was human factors, leadership commitment. You talked about psychological safety, which, you know, I can talk about that for like another podcast, Paul. But if we continue to talk about the management system, yeah, really, I mean, there's a lot of good nuggets in that playbook. So, you know, really appreciate you putting that together, you and your team. So the other thing of the management system is operational control. We're doing all this work, we are setting all this, you know, I call it like if it's a dream at the corporate level, how is it getting to the operations? How are the people who are doing the work are impacted? And the other part is change management. So if there is a change, if you bring in new equipment, if you are changing the org, you know, or if there is an SOP change, How are you, number one, how are you collecting input? Number two, how are you communicating this back to the impacted stakeholders, including the workforce? And then you have compliance, evaluation of compliance, the monitoring and measurement, doing your audit, incident review, and ultimately the goal is continual improvement, right? That's the first thing I said is it's not a destination. It's a journey. If you get from A to B, move from B to C and continue to— and when you get to Z, go back and start A again and continue to get better.

Before I actually continue, props to— thanks for bringing up the— you're reading what Jo circulated. Honestly, her and the team did a great job. And I think we already saw so much value. So many customers came back to us and people in the community came back to us thanking us for some of the information. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up. I'm sure Jo is going to be super happy to hear to hear your feedback. When it comes to management systems, I always find it so fascinating because there's so many things that are, that you need to tackle. And it's like a pretty big project. You're implementing systems that are not only there for audit, as you mentioned, and continuous improvement, but that are meant to add value and improve operational efficiency, improve, you know, the work activities of frontline workers. Maybe if you take a step back and share, you know, you're deep in that world. You know, you're using different systems, uh, you've gone through different journeys. What do you feel are the biggest challenges now when it comes to HSE management systems? You know, what, what do you wish, especially with what's happening with AI and what's happening with, you know, some, the simplification of how products are built and the engagement with the human on the front line, especially in a space like renewables where you have small pods of people. Doing very difficult maintenance work sometimes in like remote locations. What, what, just, yeah, as, as philosophical as you can be, if you were to leave the weeds and think about, you know, strategic view of what you feel needs to change or, or, or happen differently in the world of HSE management system, what comes to mind?

So quickly, what comes to mind for me is, um, Maybe it's not that futuristic, but I'll mention it here, and then hopefully it'll take the conversation to somewhere else. But for me, I think as EHS leaders, we need to continue to push the message as far as EHS is not a separate entity, right? Meaning from the management system perspective, maybe historically, you know, what we typically do is we get ready for an audit, pass the audit, everybody celebrates. But the real value is really if you do this every day, right? If you, if you follow the system every day, if you see the system as integrated to your day-to-day operations, that's where the magic happens. So our challenge as the EHS leaders is to continue to convince the workforce, continue to convince our leadership to say, EHS is not a separate function. We are here to help you. We are here to find efficiencies to make your life easier. I'll use one example, right? So earlier in my career, I worked with the contractor world, right? So that was our department where we did major projects.. And, and I've always said to our contractors, I said, I'd rather spend time with you upfront before the construction starts, before the project starts, to orient you, to give you an orientation, to, to give you all the information rather than you having a major incident later on. And, you know, we, we stop work for 2 months because, you know, you don't have your safety act together, but spend that time upfront to invest some time to really have a plan in place to manage risk. So that applies to not only construction jobs, but applies to other areas as well. When it comes to technology, you know, I don't know, maybe this is not a popular saying, but I'm excited about the potential that AI and other technologies But one of the things, and this is in your playbook as well, is we have to remember we're working with humans, right? We have to humanize technology. And the good old saying is make it simple, right? So if the end user finds it complex, I'll give you another example. If we are rolling our job briefs to an iPad or a device, and if we didn't spend the time to design that properly, and if you're making it difficult, The adaptation is not gonna be as well. But if we design systems that are easy to use, easy to understand, and people start seeing the value, built for that frontline worker.

Yeah.

Yeah. Built with that frontline worker in mind. Exactly. And from the management system perspective, Moosa is, at least from the ISO standard, right? ISO standard will kind of force you to go through that. ISO standard will say, Okay, if you truly want to be certified, if you truly want to follow this standard, we need you to talk to your frontline workers. You know, I have another analogy. This is about, you know, HOP stick analogy, right? If you can picture, this is, this is a pencil, right? So the pencil, the sharp end, this is where the magic happens. This is where the front-end workers are. And then you have all the other people, on the stick as far as, you know, management goes, regulators, all the other stakeholders. But at the end of the day, people who are, you know, switching, people who are in inside the excavation, you know, people who are driving are our workers. So if we don't hear from them, if we don't, uh, get their input, and if we're designing systems, it's not going to be easy to sell it back to them. But if you get their input upfront when we are rolling out different AI softwares and other platforms, I think it's essential to talk to the, to the field for sure.

You know, at Pixera, we're obviously building product for the frontline, so we live through this all the time, right? And I got to learn so much about the market. I got to learn so much about the industry, and I love what you're saying. It's like the biggest thing that we need to try to get to is crack solutions that work so well. And so intuitively for the people that operate on the ground. And most of the systems that exist today, and I don't know, it might— I'm happy to be proven wrong, you're way more experienced than I am on how businesses use systems. Most of them are being designed, and I see that also with our product team, most of them are always being designed for the company's management teams because they're the ones who are paying for the contract, they're the ones who are like looking for systems that make their lives easier, and then they just expect the system to cover what they need to cover for that frontline worker, you know, and a challenge I always push when I talk to the team, let's keep the management happy. Of course they need to be super happy with, so, so for example, in our space we're dealing with competence, right? So what we're trying to build is we're trying to make it so easy for management to set up their safety learning matrix, you know, using AI, recommend the best one based on your risks, give you content that is immersive or non-immersive sometimes. But just fill up a very good safety matrix, give you recommendations what other customers are using for their safety matrix, but then focus so much on the user and try to give them a profile, log their learning history, let them upload their certifications, assess them, and give them training that is engaging, that empowers them and helps them to be understood. Ultimately, the goal is to get to a place where workers can be trust— their profile can be trusted and they don't have to go through this one-size-fits-all every time they get onboarded, where it has your maybe KYC and and your medical records and your learning history, where, as you said, workers are always shuffling around, they're, they're moving to different projects all the time. And what I see as we're going on that journey to build that product is naturally because of the complexity and the size of the organizations we work with, they're always trying to dictate the product in a way that fits with the management teams. And they're, they're, they're not spending enough time thinking about the life of a frontline worker. Because they're trying to control their reality, right? They're trying to control like how they run their operation. They want to make sure they hit their compliance standards. And I feel like it's interesting to reflect on that. Like I see how naturally we're trying to be user-centric and we're naturally getting always pulled towards what management teams want the product to do. So we end up being stuck in that world where you're always doing things the way they've been done for decades, which is what's happening now. And it's hard for you to change to a more adaptive, user-friendly approach that others can trust. What are your thoughts about that, man? Like, honestly, you'd probably have advice for us. Like, how do you see, like, do you see the same challenge that I'm talking through and, and, and what are your thoughts there?

From a one-grid management system perspective, which aligns with the ISO standard, uh, requires us to have different levels of competence at different levels of the organization, starting with definitely with the field workers. You know, if you're a line worker, if you're a substation employee, if you're a gas employee, We have different training matrices that kind of assigns work to them, even for the office employees and leadership and EHS staff. So that is, you know, and again, they, when they audited us, they looked through this in detail and then they asked for sampling of records. And then the other thing that this is very interesting that the standard will do is, okay, you're doing the training, but prove to me that it's effective. You know, if you're training people on lockout tagout, if you're training people on switching, And we're looking at, you know, some of your incident data or, you know, how are you achieving effectiveness? How are you measuring competence after that? Is it because this employee has been here for 30 years and has the tribal knowledge or that the employee that was hired 2 years ago and they have the same title, how are you achieving that? They are, you know, that they may not be at the same level, but they are at a level that their role requires them to be. So that's, that's from the training perspective. So the other part is, I think, at AvanGrid, right, what, what we have in place is when we roll out these different programs, which is again part of the bigger canopy of the management system, we have Because of the ISO requirements, we have stood up in the, in the last 10 years different tools, different platforms for our employees to be able to have input. So I'll start with the renewables team. So renewables team, we have a, we have an MOC process where we encourage all of our technicians to be able to go in and, you know, if they found an improvement while they're working, put that through an MOC process. It goes to leadership, and leadership, they either nod yes or no. If they say no because they have additional questions, they go back, they make the tweaks. And most of the time, if it's betterment of the safety, it's not questioned, right? It goes back to leadership commitment because leaders say, okay, yeah, it is super interesting, and I am proud to share that, right?

So that's—

and then on a monthly weekly basis, we pull the entire workforce on a call to say, hey, these are the 3 incidents, 3 SIFs that we had. Let's review those. And then we also say, you know, we call it the innovation program. We say, okay, these are the innovation ideas that, you know, XYZ site sent us. It went through the process and we're rolling this out to other areas, which again, it helps us continually improve. It helps us to get better., and also keeps our workforce happy too, right? Because they feel heard. And going back to the human factors, if humans are heard, if they're happy, you're gonna, you're gonna keep 'em longer. So just to quickly, on the flip side, on the network side, networks is a little bit more complex as far as, you know, we have customer service, gas, electric, hydro. Um, so we have 8 different groups. We call them the skilled safety panels.. And these panels are compromised between management, union, and across 4 states. So if you can kind of foresee what's happening there, we are collecting, like, we have representatives from different areas of the business to provide input. And then if you're rolling out something, they take it back to their teams and sharing it with the, with the rest of the team at the local level. And you're gonna say, how did you set this up? Because if we wanted to be certified, we needed to build a, what do you say, a tool for us to have that consultation participation portion of the requirement. So it's been, again, over the years, I think with COVID we had some struggles, but the structure is there. We always empower our employees to speak. And then if the ideas are good, it may not happen overnight, right? Or if you want a pink ladder, maybe that's not gonna be approved, but if you want like AEDs in your truck or if you want a lighter ladder, it's gonna help you to work safe, you know, it's not questioned by our management.

That's amazing. It's like you're opening up a channel and then you're proving to them that this channel is taken very seriously and you're even thanking people who contribute to improvements when it comes to safety, which is like, a very, very powerful message across the org. As you're speaking, there are so many things I'd want to dig into because your expertise is in management systems as well. And I really believe that they need to improve for that frontline worker. And I think there's so much potential over the next few years using— I completely agree with you. It's all about humans, but I think the interesting thing is you can simplify work activity, reduce wasted time, and help them run their job easier. I think when you understand people better, when you have more personalized journeys, when you have more risk-based journeys. But not to keep going deeper into that, maybe we'll have a different session where we'll just dig into different systems and talk in more detail. I know you speak about compliance versus risk-based safety. Can you share a few things about what that really means to you and what advice you have for people around it?

You know, one of the sayings that I continually use is compliance is the floor and risk is the ceiling. And really, we need to break through that ceiling So I think the way that we set up our system is we have different tools and you're right, we can spend like another episode on that alone. But we identified all of our legal obligations, not only at EHS level, but different parts of the organization. And we have tools to ensure that we are following those compliance items. But if we kind of set that aside and start thinking risk-based, and this kind of ties into what you just talked about, right? So making it easy for the end user, you know, training and giving them digital tools. I'll use one example. So this is probably a pipe dream of mine, which is, which is, I, you know, and I think over the years it will happen, but Imagine if, if we had a tool that we spent a lot of time to build a job hazard analysis in the background, right? In an environment, it's not after an incident, right? We're building this in an environment where we have the time, we are able to interview employees day to day. And then exactly, day to day. And then there's nothing hanging over their head to say, you know, if I say the wrong thing, somebody's going to get in trouble, you know, especially if it happens after an incident, right? So once we build those, if we were to link those to a job brief in the field, so when you're filling the job brief or if you're talking to AI or if you're, if you have the iPads, it auto-populates, it's going to say, okay, if you are changing a pole, at minimum, these are the hazards that you're going to be. Did you account for traffic? You know, like, did you call They save. And I think from the end user perspective, I think our people, nobody comes to work to intentionally get hurt or to have an incident. But if we give them the right tool, and quite honestly, AI is not going to get everything right either, right? AI is going to say, hey, here's what I, based on the JHAs that we built, the library, these are your risks., but you, the human, are in the field. You can change this. You can adapt to this based on, you know, if it's January versus August, your risk, you know, you're not going to have 90-degree weather in Rochester, New York in January, for example.

You're going to be dealing with the cold weather. Sorry, I cut you off because you were saying this is a pipe dream. By the way, there are tools out there that do this now, and we've done a few prototypes with our customers. Have you seen this in action?

I can like share quite a bit.

No, that again, it's something that we don't have in-house. Yes. Just side note, because I think the fact that you mentioned this is so interesting, by the way. We're lucky to be in a position where we're dealing with, you know, many, many customers around the world. And when you think about, when you creatively think about safety with executives, typically learning is important. Like you can make learning engaging, personalized, et cetera. But the biggest impact you can have is on the frontline during the activity., right? And something that we sometimes, something that we always bring up, literally what you said now, if you're doing a medical operation and you take a step back and you go through your pre-task checks, which is like what you're gonna do before the operation, your likelihood of, of having an issue during the operation reduces by 80%. So obviously we've adopted that within, within construction where we tell people, do your pre-task check. Now with AI, not only can you take a picture of it,, but you can also record your voice and you can see the engagement of the group and you can summarize what the person has said and you can just give them feedback and say, great job, Ergin, you covered 1, 2, 3, 4. There's one more thing that maybe you should consider, et cetera, et cetera. So we've done these pilots with some customers. So customers who said, okay, we've trained people, let's go deeper into the frontline. We've created prototypes and we run these. The interesting things that happened, the reason why we really believe in this and we believe it's the future, having these apps move with the user, where you understand the supervisor, you understand their background, their competence, and now you're with them day to day, is we wanted to do 3 sessions at specific sites, and it always happens. And then the users, you know, let's say you have 4 different supervisors and the supervisor is doing a pre-work activity. In most cases, the supervisor just keeps using the app themselves for several times after, and they'd be engaged. Like, why did this kind of die out? Because suddenly the supervisor is also seen in the organization, you know, and suddenly the supervisor sees that management is understanding that they're on the front line doing the work and they're seeing that they're— so one of it, of course, is enablement. And it's very simple. It's not— they're not doing anything crazy, but suddenly they're able to see that there's data around their work. The management is seeing data about their work. And then small things you can start doing when you implement something like this is as a site manager, you can say, By the way, today the weather is going to be windy or it's going to be rainy, and then everyone's pre-task briefing will automatically populate certain things that are important. But you're taking a step where you're always bringing people back to the moment to be aware of the activity, and you're allowing everyone to connect with it and highlight the risks and collaborate. So it's very, very powerful. It's like a very simple, powerful thing that AI enables. And I think every company should be exploring it. Like, we're a bit sad as a company that we're pushing it a bit away as a feature because we have just so much to build out in the competence space and onboarding space. But it's definitely something that we believe in and we've prototyped already. If you'd like to take this offline, honestly, the product team would even push that prototype to you if you want to play with it and test and see how it would work with you and your team. But it's so interesting how you brought it up as a pipe dream and you thought of it from from scratch because it's obviously one of the most powerful things we believe you can do using AI.

I call it pipe dream because I think I mentioned this in the beginning, right? So when you even talk about this, you're like, you're crazy. Like, people are like, no, that's crazy. That's not possible, right? So, you know, as I was listening to you, like, what you just said is super powerful in my mind. And, you know, I wish we could just like put this in a time capsule and listen to it in 20 years or 50 years, 100 years, 10 years. I don't know what the time frame is.

Even AI is so fast.

And come back and say— 2, 3 years, hopefully. Yeah, I mean, you're like, you're way ahead of me there. But, but I think, you know, when I was, um, what I was thinking is, uh, I'll give you another example, right? Heinrich's Pyramid, it's 100 years old, right? At the time, it was revolutionary, right? We, we needed, we needed something to manage safety, and now we're definitely moving away from it, right? We are, we are looking at other options. We're looking at SIF criteria, we're looking at HECA, um, and, and really debunking that. So, so just the fact that we are looking into these, and, and it may not happen overnight, it's not going to happen overnight, but if we don't have these conversations, if If we don't try it, if we don't prototype and test it, we're not going to get there. So give you and your team a lot of kudos for definitely partnering with some of the other companies to push that forward. I think it's an essential work. And once it's mainstream, it will help people. And what you said about Supervisor being able to put one information and then, you know, okay, today is going to be -10 Fahrenheit in Rochester, New York, you know, or it's going to be 90 degrees, you know, stay hydrated. Those are silly examples, but for, for the entire crew to have the same information, or tornadoes coming our way, you know, if, if we can communicate that in a timely manner, it just makes life a lot easier. And it's not it's part of the operations, right? That's another point I was making earlier is it's not something extra. We're already, you know, doing this. And if we train our people, you know, you talk a lot about training. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And again, it may not be a technical training, but if we roll these tools out and if we give them the why and if we make it easy for them, definitely there's a lot of value of linking those.

So I look forward to kind of digging more into that and learning more for sure. Yeah, honestly, it's like, I believe that what's going to happen in safety is actually a lot, we're going to see a lot more change than we can imagine. I feel that in my heart, you know, as I learn more, like as I've seen different tools, we can talk about them in different situations, but as I see what's happening just by being on X, you know, just by being on X seeing the different tools and the different technologies that are coming up and us playing with them as a team, we're like, everything we're going to invest in and build now, I feel like is going to change very quickly as well and it's going to get much better. It's like we're in a wave of change and it's interesting to keep taking a step back and probably not trying to overdo things, but just trying to learn what's out there. Because I feel like at some point we're going to settle to a new norm. Of course, change is always a constant, but I think we're in the middle of really big change just because we're moving to hyper-personalized, user-focused, much more. So instead of me building out a safety learning matrix and putting very heavy content, I should be able to get recommendations for the best understanding of my risks, the best kind of content that's measured against other content, mapped and matched. I should be able to understand people through basic assessments similar to doing— so personalization is coming, and I think it's going to be super exciting.

Yeah, from the management system perspective, right, the framework and the structure perspective, and you talked about change management. So when the change is 1,000 miles per hour, at least the way that we set up our system is that, okay, if there's a change occurring that's going to potentially hurt somebody or impact somebody, We need to manage it in a methodical way, meaning that it goes back to who are the stakeholders, who is it going to impact, do they have the desire to change? Because I think you said this, right? Change is the only constant, but if the change is not managed properly, the sustainability of the change or the reinforcement of the change it's gonna fall apart, right? The change is gonna be rolled out 2 months later. If we don't reinforce that, if we don't tell the people what's in it for me, going back to the old ways, because we are human and that's our comfort zone and that's what we're gonna do. But with all these technologies, if we spend the time, number 1, to make it simple, to get the input from the end user, And then when you're rolling it out, also raise the awareness, right? Not only send an email to say, here's the software, have fun with it, figure it out, but really be intentional about going back to that stakeholder. In this case, is it the supervisors, or do I need to go in front of the leadership and get their buy-in? Maybe it's not a 4-hour training, but it's a 30-minute briefing to say, we're going to be rolling this out and you need your support. Or with the end users like EHS staff, maybe we need more time with them because people are going to come back to them and ask questions. So when you have those plans and when you manage the change in a methodical way, the success rate is going to be huge. Of course, the software, the tools, you know, they are going at a high pace, but I do see in you know, you mentioned 3 years, 10 years, we're going to be in a position where these tools are going to help our workforce to, to be safer.

Absolutely. I love that you said that. Honestly, like, being on the technology product side, we always feel like we're running, but the reality is you have to slow down and move to the pace of what keeps people safe and how management can be, can be done. I love that you shared that. Thank you. It's, it's always, it's always also a good reminder because It's easy to get lost in, in the volume of change. But yeah, Ergin, I, one last thing for me. I know you're super passionate about HOP and, and safety culture. If there are a few things you can share there, and then I'd love to just also hear what, what sort of advice you would have for people, particularly maybe in your, in the space you operate in, which is management systems.

The entire management system, it's It's a puzzle, and things like compliance, things like training, things like monitoring and measurement, HOP is part of that puzzle. Risk management, operational control, you know, incident review, those are all part of the puzzle. But for me, the HOP, you know, and I'm sure you've heard the, um, the HOP principles, right? People make mistakes. Errors are likely and situations are predictable. Context drives behavior. Learning is essential. And then how do you respond to failure matters. So people make mistakes. Error-likely situations are predictable. Context drives behavior. Learning is essential. And how do you respond to failure matters. So what does this mean? And the— again, I— when I talk to people, I say we really need to move away from the term safety culture, right? And, and what I mean by that is, is that it's really the company culture, right? We have to look at that bigger picture, and HOP fits in nicely, right? Nobody comes to work to do a bad job. You know, you woke up this morning, you say, hey, I'm going to go and hurt myself. You know, nobody, nobody does that intentionally. But if we think about the HOP perspective, it's basically building resilient systems to make the employee more successful at the end of the day. So putting more controls in place, you know, listening to the employees, So at AvantGrid, what we've done, one of the things we have done is really changed our incident investigation method where, you know, we've, in some cases, we adopted learning teams. And what learning teams are is, you know, you have different stakeholders on that call. And, you know, day one, you sit down and you don't try to solve, you just, everybody just gives their input. They say, okay, this is what happened, these are the facts, this is how I saw what happened. And in complex incidents, there's multi-stakeholders that are involved. So we spend, I don't know, 2, 3 hours, and then we send everybody home, and then we have what's called soak time. And they come tomorrow and say, oh, by the way, I thought about this, and then I forgot to mention that these things also happened.. And after that, you know, kind of calibration happens, we go into solving. We say, okay, what can we do? And we don't look for root causes, right? The old investigation method, they look at for one root cause and then, you know, move on. And it's typically communication or lack of awareness, which really, from the management system perspective, we really need to move away from those and, and look at how the systems are going to help employees to, to be safer. And this also applies to environment side as well. So if there's a big spill, you can apply this learning team methodology. But for me, the message here is really it's culture, it's humanizing safety. You know, I was looking at your playbook, talks about psychological safety. We have some work going on there. When people are being heard, when there is no punishment attached to it and we have a culture of learning and improving, it helps our workforce to be safe and definitely create a better work environment.

They're creative, they're leaning in, they're not operating from a place of fear. But yeah, amazing. Ergin, honestly, it's been great talking to you. I know we only touched on a few things that I was leaning to going deep into a few areas, but I knew we're limited. On time, but hopefully we'll schedule something maybe when we see each other in person at some point. But yeah, really appreciate you joining. I love your angle of experience. Like, I haven't spoken to someone with your particular experience and your view on systems before, so thank you so much for sharing. I'm sure many people are going to benefit from this.

And yeah, if you have any closing statements, please feel free to share. Moussa, thank you so much for today. Really, I'm really grateful for you to be able to set up this platform for many voices to be amplified. Most recently, I had a quick story and one last story. This is related to my son. He came home and he said, every 6 seconds, a size of a soccer field or a football field from the forest is being taken away. I had to look it up. I'm like, that seems pretty high. And I looked it up and it's factual. Every 6 seconds. So, And why am I mentioning this is because if a 10-year-old can come home and share that kind of information and he wants to do something about it, he wants to be more responsible from sustainability perspective, we as the safety leaders have the responsibility not only empower our current customers, our current workforce, but definitely the future, like my son who's, you know, who's coming home with a fact like that and really plant the seed with them to really carry into the future to make the world a better place from environmental perspective and a safer perspective as well. Same thing with my 6-year-old, right? She came home one day and said, they asked me, what does daddy do at work? And she said, my daddy makes sure that people don't get zapped. So if a 5-year-old, 6-year-old have that idea, and it's not about me, right? It's about, you know, if they have these plans seeded into their head for the future, we as safety professionals have that responsibility to, um, to continue to share that message, not give up. So my closing comment, Moussa, really is strong systems, they do 3 things. They protect people, they empower culture, and sustain performance, right, in a continual improvement way. So as EHS leaders, we need to build systems that are resilient in the face of change. We talked a lot about change, human-centered on how they support people. And future-ready for challenges ahead, things like AI and other challenges. So as humans, we manage risk every day, but as leaders, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to do it proactively and systemically and with purpose. So proactive, systemic, and with purpose. And if we can achieve those, you know, one last quote, which, you know, I was having coffee with my wife yesterday and then She's like, why don't you use this one? You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So let's build the greater ones together. Let's put greater systems together. It's not about the goals. The goals we can achieve and then forget about it. But if the systems are in place, those systems, if we win the lottery or if we leave our position, systems will be there to achieve more and more goals.

I love it. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's, it's always a strong reminder, you know, to focus on the systems, think long-term, build the right foundations.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing this, Ergin.

It was super, super nice to have you with us, and I really look forward to seeing you soon.

Musa, thank you so much again. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for listening to the Safety Heroes Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click follow. Until next time. Stay safe. Thank you for listening to the Safety Heroes podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click follow.

Until next time, stay safe.