A team of one

As a safety team of one, Holly Burgess recommends that anyone in her position have a good ear, thick skin and a loud voice – among many other traits.

“I’m kind of loud, and I’m kind of out there,” said the safety and health manager at Phoenix Paper, a Kentucky-based paper producer. “If you don’t have somebody to walk you around a plant and introduce you, you have to introduce yourself, which I do all the time.”

Burgess considers any time spent building relationships with workers a win for safety. But being a one-person team has plenty of challenges, including isolation and a never-ending schedule of meetings, tasks, trainings and, in some cases, travel.

For Burgess, who has had multiple solo roles during her safety career, including managing workers at more than a dozen sites across the country, time can be the biggest challenge for someone managing safety on their own across numerous locations. “You’re never able to be proactive and never able to get ahead. You’re just fighting fires the whole time.”

Along with Burgess, Safety+Health spoke with four other safety pros who have experience working as a team of one to discuss how they manage their time, find positives, earn trust and remain present for the people they serve.

The challenge of time

In her role, Burgess said she developed an elaborate schedule to make sure she visited workers at every location and showed her teams she was serious.

“They knew I was going to be there the third week of every month, or I’d be in Michigan every other month,” she said. “Yes, it’s a lot of travel, but every location I went to – especially at the beginning – I got in front of people, and not just from a training standpoint. I got in the trucks with them. I tried to build that relationship. I made them realize that I was a 24/7 service to them.”

As a third-generation owner of Fraser Engineering Co. in Newton, MA, Shawna Fraser Nagle prides herself on the company’s safety culture, which she calls “a culture of caring.” She said she dedicates two days a week to construction site visits amid her day-to-day paperwork. Fraser Nagle, who is vice president of safety and co-owner of the company, added that she uses her time with workers to offer guidance – not admonishment.

“I love going on the jobsites,” she said. “I don’t like going out to the jobsite just being the ‘safety cop.’ I’m not out there to find problems and reprimand people. I want to be that coach. I want to be that person they come to for help.”

Before he joined the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration as an industrial hygienist, Jamie Green spent 26 years in the manufacturing industry, many of them as a one-person safety team.

He said his time on the floor with employees provided the most value.

“You want to create this personal work relationship versus a boss-employee relationship,” he said. “Spend time with them at the job function. Roll up your sleeves. Stand right next to them. Listen to them with the intent to understand them and what they go through on a daily basis. Then they start feeling valued.”

Whether facing a pile of paperwork or in the middle of a meeting, Burgess has learned to stop when a co-worker wants her time.

“It’s important to build that relationship and talk to that person,” she said. “If there’s someone out in the field or in the plant and they’re wanting to talk to you about something that’s really important to them, how important is that paper sitting back at your desk?”

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Selling safety

One-person safety teams appreciate having advocates, but those relationships need to be nurtured.

Nicole Moonier, safety director at Citizens Electric Corp. in Perryville, MO, said selling safety to others is one of her biggest challenges.

“Being in safety and being on your own, you really have a hard time with selling,” she said. “You know what needs to be done, but you really have to do your research and prepare yourself for going into a conversation with leadership and operations to get them on board and talk about the whys.”

Selling safety, however, takes two different approaches for a one-person team, says Melissa Black, president of MsR3, the Atlanta-based safety consulting company she founded. “You have to motivate the employees on an emotional level more than anything else,” said Black, who also is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia Southern University and an instructor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The behavior won’t change unless there’s an emotional reason.

“When you get to the C-suite, you have to do a total flip – business-focused, concise, money, bottom-line impact.”

Avoiding pitfalls

As a one-person safety team, isolation is a common challenge.

“It’s almost as if they feel like an afterthought,” Green said. “They’re not included in daily leadership team meetings, making decisions. From there, it creates a vicious cycle. You have new equipment coming in. It doesn’t meet MIOSHA standards or doesn’t have the right guarding. A new chemical comes in without being cleared first to make sure it’s not going to cause any hazards.”

Fraser Nagle said getting buy-in from others in your organization is a big boost. “You can feel very alone,” she said. “With our leadership team, I have their buy-in, so I don’t feel so isolated. If I bring something to the table, we’re going to stop and look at it. When you show people that safety is everyone’s responsibility, it does help.”

Moonier said experiencing feelings of isolation pushed her to be more assertive, asking to be included in more meetings, participating more in meetings and spending more time talking to workers in the field.

The latter provided a somewhat scary reward when a crew of linemen was practicing a “pole top rescue” during her visit. “They said, ‘Nicole, do you want to learn how to climb the pole?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘No, not really, but I will.’ So I did that with them. They got a good laugh out of it.”

That exercise also helped her gain some trust from the crews she’s trying to keep safe every day.

With mountains of duties to keep workers safe, solo safety pros can benefit from prioritizing the issues their workers face. Several experts said focusing on the biggest risks in their specific industry is a good starting place, while others said a rotating schedule of training topics is beneficial.

Green suggested making training priorities visual by writing them on a whiteboard and having workers rate them based on the most critical. “Create that buy-in,” he said.

Strategy session

Having an impact as a one-person safety team can be accomplished in several ways. The experts shared some tips.

Think coach, not cop: By viewing safety from the perspective of a teacher rather than a safety cop, Fraser Nagle said she has strengthened relationships with co-workers. “You’ve got to earn that respect, especially in construction,” she said. “You need to work with people and not make it feel like you’re working against them.”

Credit others: When co-workers come up with ideas, give them credit. Burgess found this advice especially valuable. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many work crews were denied access to public bathrooms. So, one worker found a product online that turned urine into a gel that could be sealed and thrown directly into the garbage. “I bought boxes of them,” Burgess said. “When that idea becomes a reality, they need to have the credit for that.”

Be a valued resource: During his career in manufacturing, Green often was the first person workers went to, even before their supervisors. “I’m getting paged over the intercom because they trust me more than their supervisor,” he said. “Something new came in and they didn’t know what the hazards are, so we would address it.”

Find your network: Even the go-to safety person needs a go-to, Moonier says. “Have a network of safety professionals around that you can share with, you can learn from, ask questions of, bounce ideas off, share ideas and so forth,” she said.