In this keynote, Margaret Spence challenges safety professionals and leaders to examine the value they bring each day—to themselves, their employees, their organization, and society. She argues that knowing and clearly communicating that value is essential for job security, especially in economic downturns, where those who can articulate a return on investment stay employed while others are let go. Spence critiques the common practice of treating workers as interchangeable “shoes” and reducing safety training to a box‑checking exercise that satisfies OSHA without truly protecting people. Drawing on her 17‑year experience running a safety company, she explains why she stopped offering superficial training, emphasizing that genuine value lies in ensuring workers return home safely to their families. She calls for a shift from viewing employees as positions or titles to seeing them as vital human assets, underscoring the moral principle that every life matters and that this principle should be the core of the safety professional’s value proposition.
Chapters
When you got out of bed this morning, brushed your teeth, put on the fancy clothes, ladies in the room, you did all that makeup stuff, you know, that we do, and you got out and you got in your car, did you ask yourself, what is the value that I'm bringing to Today. As I go out and I try to start my day, what value am I bringing to the people who work for me? What value am I bringing to myself? What value am I bringing to the organization that hired me? And what value am I bringing to the world in general? It's a key question. Because those of us who are in the safety space, this space that we occupy, it is extremely important for us to understand our value and the value that we bring to our organizations. We cannot ask people to follow us if we are not clear about the value that we bring to the table. What is your importance? And is your importance relevant to where the organization is headed? You know, one of the things that I learned out of the economic downturn was the people who knew their value, the people who could clearly express the return on investment that their organization received from them, they stayed employed. The people who couldn't articulate why the organization should to keep them working got a pink slip and they ended up on the unemployment line. And once they got onto the unemployment line, they still haven't been able to figure out the value they're going to offer to the next organization and they're still unemployed. One of the, one of the most interesting things is if you go to any organization, the very first thing the thing that they'll say to you is, "My people are my most valued asset." You hear that all the time. You hear it. The people are my most valued asset. We could not do this job without the people here. But the reality is, your people are dispensable because you treat them like shoes. Very few of us in this room actually want to get out there and shovel that cement. So if we don't want to shovel the cement and we're asking someone else to shovel it for us. We have to be thinking that they bring value to the table even if they're at the bottom of the pile. If we don't invest in training, and I mean really training people, I don't mean going out there and saying, you know, this is the safety rule, OSHA said blah blah blah, OSHA says we've got to do, we've got to check all these boxes. So I'm gonna check the box and it's gonna take me 2 seconds or less to check the box. Let me tell you one of the reasons why I don't do safety training anymore. When I started my company 17 years ago, I thought, you know what, I could do safety training because I get the ROI part of the safety training. I also get the fact that people should be trained to prevent injuries. And after a while, I got so annoyed with that whole process that no one can call me now for safety training. I won't do it because I don't think that people value their employees enough to really want to train them. I think they value them enough to, you know, clock them in, get the job done, clock them out. And we hope that when we clock them out, they're going home in one piece to their family. What all of us need to understand, the value that we bring to our organization and the value that we bring to the people who work for our organization is that they get to go home at night to their family. We have to not see them as positions. We cannot see them as job titles. We cannot see them as a body that is filling a position. We have to see them as a valuable asset that's coming to the table, that's allowing us to do the things we do, make the money that we're making, build the buildings that we're building, and moving from point A to point B. So think of it, the value proposition that we bring to the table as safety professionals is that we understand that every life matters. And because every life matters, we get up every day and we do what we do.
