[00:00:54] Dave: Hi everybody. My name's David Tibbetts. I'm the Chief Safety Officer at Highwire. Just for a little bit of quick background about Highwire and myself. I have been at Highwire for nine years. Prior to joining Highwire, I was at Harvard University, where I managed the construction safety program for the last few years of my time there.

And Highwire was actually founded at Harvard. Because we needed to understand a little bit more about the risks that contractors were presenting when they were bidding and working on our campuses. And that's a similar service that we provide to our clients today.

I'm gonna turn it over to my guest, Mike, and have him introduce himself, talk a little bit about his career and his company, and then we're gonna dive into our topic for today.

Mike, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:01:38] Mike: Good afternoon. My name is Mike Hennebery. I am the Senior Director of EH&S for a company called Torcon Incorporated. We're a construction management firm slash general contractor that does work primarily in the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania area.

Our market share is largely healthcare and pharmaceuticals. We do some projects that are for higher education, we'll do some work for commercial organizations, and that can be through a developer or direct through an owner. We've been in business since 1965. We're a family-owned organization, about 250 people.

We do not have trades on our payroll. We're strictly a management firm. I have been with Torcon, 31 years now. During that time, I've served in every possible role as a safety professional.

And also dealt with my share of challenges and trying to really do stuff that's gonna work and not just check a box.

[00:02:46] Dave: Great to hear. Thanks, Mike. And you've been there at Torcon for quite a while now. It speaks to the company and the type of culture that they have there.

Must be a great testament to the company there, having seen that you've stayed there for so long.

[00:02:59] Mike: And also their attitude towards project safety and the owner's involvement in it. And just the overall culture has been built since the eighties, when we really started having an active safety program.

Seeing what's out there and trying to always keep it moving forward.

[00:03:19] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a great transition to our topic today, inspections and inspection programs. For me personally, I've had a lot of experience implementing inspection programs throughout my career, and of course, as I mentioned.

Inspections and hazard identification is one of the solutions that we provide here at Highwire. And I just before we dive in, I just wanna speak to what I believe is a really important part of any sophisticated safety management system. It's really integral to any organization's ability to understand performance, to identify opportunities to continuously improve.

Mike, I think there can be this perception of inspections as just something you have to do. It's maybe a compliance mindset. We know that we're supposed to be out there conducting inspections, and so we're gonna do it right, but that's something that we really want to try to de-emphasize today and talk about the value that inspections can provide.

My first question for you. At Torcon, how do you think about an approach inspection and hazard identification programs? I think one of the things we're gonna do today is be honest about where we've been, where we are today, and where we hope to go in the future. But talk a little bit about Torcon's approach, your current thinking, and how you approach inspection and hazard identification programs.

[00:04:41] Mike: We deal with, there's not a simple answer to that question because the safety inspection, safety evaluation, hazard ID, whatever it's, an evolving process. I think, and unfortunately, what the construction industry relies on heavily are checklists. Hazard identification is relatively easy for the safety professional to go out there and see this, see that.

The greater challenge is where that focus needs to lie, right? I refer to the term end user. Our end users are the people on our projects, the tradespeople, that are building the project for the eventual end user. So you've gotta look at how it's gonna impact them.

To me, it's always been a real challenge to get value out of your hazard ID program. The most effective thing you're gonna have on a project, as far as that is concerned, is an individual, whether it be a tradesperson or management, or safety professional sees a hazard and they identify it and they bring the person over who's gonna help to, get rid of that hazard, and then it's done.

Okay. But when we're looking at data, it becomes more challenging. Ideally, you want what I would refer to as the end users to be identifying these hazards and then bringing them to light. And typically, they're gonna bring it to construction management or their foreman.

Those stats should be mitigated. Unfortunately, we've fallen into this checklist mindset. We're as guilty as anybody is of this. We have a project management software that we use. We also use Highwire, which I'll talk about later.

Where our superintendents, field engineers, project managers, what have you, go out in a job and they make observations and they either complete the checklist on the job or they make their observations, take notes, and then come back to the trail and fill out the checklist according to what they've seen.

The problem is most often, you can go through these checklists and you don't really get any information outta 'em because all that you're getting out of is that somebody did their checklist. Cause you're getting things where everything's okay, no problems on the job, housekeeping's great, lighting's great, no problem. Everybody's wearing the PPE, everything's a hundred percent. But to me, that doesn't tell the story. On top of that, we take these as a leading metric that we say, okay, we did X number of inspections or checklists this month.

But what's that really mean? The challenge we've had is getting that line of communication from the initial observation to the responsible party, to the workforce, to alert them of the hazard, to the correcting party, to completion. For the people on my safety staff, it's a little bit easier because they're safety full-time.

For somebody like a superintendent or an engineer or a project manager who's got 15 other things they're looking to do as well, at that same moment in time, it's not quite as fluid and turns into, Hey, get over here and fix this. Okay, it's done. Let's go off to the next thing. As an industry, it's very challenging to get

a level of participation that's meaningful. Oftentimes, people are siloed in what it is they do. Project engineers do project engineer work. Any good company is not going to be okay with that. You want a robust safety culture, all your employees are gonna be involved.

We work with all subcontractor labor. They come in with their own inspection programs that may or not have been written by their own company and often never implemented.

We have one client that requires every contractor, every single day fills out a project site inspection checklist. There's probably 120 items on it. And if you look at these things are filled out in pen or pencil, just a series of check marks. There's no meaningful information.

[00:08:40] Dave: I think you're touching on a really key point, Mike, that we'll focus on a lot today. There's a couple of different things you brought up there that I think we should dive in a little deeper on. At a certain point, when organizations implement an inspection program, they want to get people out in the field conducting inspections, and maybe they're using a checklist.

At a certain point, you're like, great, we did 35 inspections this month. But at a certain point, you want to shift focus from quantity to quality. Are we doing quality inspections? Is the data meaningful? Oftentimes, when talking to clients, we have that conversation of, We want to help you get your inspection program off the ground as a first step.

But at a certain point, we want to shift the focus to quality. How do we do that? What are some of the ways that you think of where, maybe, we could get away from that checklist approach or move away from the idea that the volume of inspections means that we're doing a good job? Really being able to look at the data and saying our inspection program is in really good shape.

We're getting really good data, not just from our safety professionals, but from our superintendents and our project managers, and our field engineers. We want to shift from that quantity mindset to quality.

[00:09:56] Mike: It gets challenging because there's an interpersonal thing that gets involved with this. If you're working in the field and, some of our project management software has somewhat failed in this regard, but we do have the ability to go through and make quote-unquote observations and issue some communication to people.

That, Okay, there's a hazard that needs to get taken care of, and here's what it is, all right. Now, what happens sometimes is this communication gets automatically distributed. It might go to the project foreman, but also on that distribution list that we don't have time to necessarily go through and fix at every given moment.

That distribution may also go to his road super, the project manager, the vice president of the subcontractor, the owner of the subcontractor. And what happens is it actually becomes negative. Instead of pointing out an issue that's on the project that needs to be taken care of constructively, it gets construed by people who aren't necessarily involved with the project.

All right? Directly. It gets construed as a fault. And then the foreman ends up reprimanded by his company owner or road super, whoever. And then they sometimes become less amenable to working with our field people because they feel as though I got screwed by this.

That's a challenge that we've run into where the results of safety inspections are treated as negative instead of something where, hey, we just pointed something out that could have been a fatality, and we're fixing it. That's a positive thing. And I use this example a lot with my people that I work with in the field is whenever something bad happens on a job.

You hit a utility. All right. Unintentionally, of course. There's a near-miss incident, right? That was reported. Generally speaking, the people that are directly involved with the situation are going to respond positively toward whatever action is being taken immediately. That's not your problem. The problem is the perception of the management layers that are maybe two to three layers of management away from the actual situation, and their reaction to it, that causes all this panic to ensue.

[00:12:07] Dave: So we started shifting to the idea of quantity versus quality. So that's part of it. But what you steered towards was how do we create the right sort of perception of what we're trying to deliver with our inspection program?

How do we build a positive culture internally within our own organization? But how do we also use it to strengthen the relationships that we have with our contractors? So there's an important aspect. One, yes, we want to get better quality inspections. A quality inspection does include both positive and negative observations.

When we communicate those negative observations, what is the approach that we're taking to communicating those? How are those received? How are they perceived? How do we view them ourselves, internally, and how do we use them?

[00:12:55] Mike: There's sort of a culture of if you didn't, if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. People hang their hat on that from, because things have gotten so litigious. There are times when I think in trying to make sure that the paper trail is established, that we might get bogged down and actually look at what the real issue is.

All right. There's also a hesitancy on people's part to provide good data because they're worried that you're walking this job and you found 20 things that are wrong. What the hell's wrong with the project? And to me, that means this person is actually looking.

And finding things and making an impact on the job instead of just pencil-whipping something. My feeling is with these project safety evaluations, inspections, is you want that to represent what that person is seeing on the job.

Whether it be all positive stuff or all negative stuff, or all hazardous. A good quality safety report has observations of good things, observations of hazards that need to be corrected, and tells a story about the inspection that this person did.

I wanna see pictures. I wanna see pictures of best practices. I wanna see pictures or descriptions of situations that need to be corrected and the corrective action as well. That's what I want to see. We also started working on the observation end of things and getting a little bit more granular.

[00:14:14] Dave: And to me, again, looking at it as telling the story, we focus on individual subcontractors with that. It can give us a better idea of strengths and weaknesses on that particular day. All right? Whether it's housekeeping, PPE, whatever. You have to decide what it is you want. Yeah. You mentioned pencil whipping. I've started to call it the "Everything is Awesome" syndrome for anyone with kids of a certain age who have seen The Lego Movie, maybe a number of times, right? Everything is awesome, right? I go out there and I, all I'm doing is making positive observations.

Everything's great. The job is clean, PPE is being worn. We know that's not reality. We do need to recognize positives; we don't want to get away from that. There are a lot of really great things that happen on your jobs. And if you're only identifying negative conditions, unsafe behaviors, if you're only focused on those, that's another thing that can put the perception of your inspection program at risk.

So I used to, I used to have a mindset of, an inspection should have 50 observations or 75 observations. That's what makes a good inspection. We should be looking at a lot of different categories and a lot of different contractors, and I used to think a lot about volume. But what I've evolved my thinking on most recently, curious to get your perspective on it, is what I really want people doing is telling me about the exceptions.

Whether those are positives or negatives, I want to know about the things that they see that they think are valuable. The really good behaviors and conditions, the planning that led to really good execution. I don't want to see 15 unsafe observations about safety glasses anymore. I want to see a good cross-section of categories.

I wanna make sure we're looking at the highest risk work and identifying things going well and poorly, and I wanna make sure those things are getting addressed in a timely manner.

[00:16:15] Mike: The way I look at it, with job site conditions. If you have certain things in place, you won't have problems in other areas.

I have four things, it's like my four pillars when I go onto a job. If these four things are in place, typically everything else will be easier. Housekeeping has to be first and foremost. Is the workspace well-lit so that the employees can perform their tasks in a safe manner?

All right. Are the fall protection provisions in place? Are the guardrails up? Are the stairs appropriately guarded? Are all the floor holes covered? Because that can impact anybody who's walking through. And then lastly, do we have safe access in and outta the building for the employees to go to the workspaces?

If I look at a safety inspection and see housekeeping is poor, guardrails are down, lighting is bad, I can almost guarantee you that there's gonna be PPE problems, smoking, all that stuff. The lower-hanging fruit is also gonna be bad.

When I look at a safety report and there's pictures of clean workspaces, and thought-out plans for fall protection and access, and there's not lights burned out all over the place.

If those things are a problem, yet they say everybody's wearing their safety glasses. That's not gonna be truthful. I wanna look at the quality of life things on the project before I start getting into PPE. As a safety professional, there's nothing worse for your mindset as a safety manager or safety professional than when you go up to a person who's not wearing your plug safety glasses, whatever, gloves.

And for whatever reason, that's where your eyes go. You go over and you talk to an individual, and they turn to you and say, Okay, that's fine, but this place is a disaster. There's guardrails down. I can't see what I'm doing. And, you're worried about safety glasses? And it's happened to every single person that's in safety, and you look at yourself and say, you know what?

We're focusing on the wrong stuff. We look at our subcontractors and do observation reports for each of them just to get an idea of their own safety culture and how we're gonna look at that down the line.

But, as a general contractor, it's important the place is clean. If we can't figure out how to keep the job clean, you may as well stop even doing the reports. It's because it's such an important thing, and the trades deserve to have a place they wanna come work in, not feel as if they are working in a minefield.

All the other stuff, nitpicking about whatever is gonna nitpick about extension cords. It's all important stuff, but it really has to start from the basics that are gonna cause 80% of your problems, and then break it down from there.

[00:18:55] Dave: Yeah. You could hurt your own credibility pretty quickly if you go down the path you just mentioned.

[00:19:00] Mike: The behavior of some people on projects because they've, they've dealt with situations where they're getting written about something pretty minor.

Meanwhile, they're worried about falling out the side of the building, but they're getting written up for not having eye protection on, and that's a really just shows a very poor style of management. But we've all been there. As safety professionals, we've had situations where we're trying to do our job the way we think it needs to be done.

But are we really capturing the true culture of the project? Is this a good job? Do people like to come to work? Or is it mismanaged, and safety is something that the convenient stuff will go after, but we need laborers in the job site, and uh, I'm gonna go bother this guy about his safety glasses instead. So it can be a very delicate thing. How you conduct safety inspections and who's looking at it. And the one thing I've been doing lately and more than I had been doing previously is I ask all our project executives when they're gonna be on site and I say when you're there, I'll be there and we're gonna walk and you're gonna see what I see when I'm on the job, because they're not looking at that stuff.

And it has to be these inspections, these walkthroughs, even if they're not filling these sheets out, I like them to be with somebody who is. Alright. And then be copied on that because I want safety professionals, cause they see things through a different lens. And, I like having people in positions of influence in the company, whether it's our ownership or our project executives.

This is nothing new. People do this all the time, but having them see what I'm seeing and say, Hey, listen, these guys have a crappy attitude. Maybe 'cause it's our fault. Maybe we're not providing the right working environment.

You gotta remember who your end users is, what it comes down to. It's not the checklist. It's people in the field, and that's what you really have to carry your job site inspections toward.

[00:20:49] Dave: Yep. Yeah, for sure. Mike, let's transition a little bit and think about how a sophisticated inspection program with aggregated data how can that be used? I'm gonna, I want to talk about it from two different perspectives. I want to talk about how that type of aggregated data can be used for you to influence your own organization or to identify opportunities for improvement within your own organization. And then after that, I want to touch on it a little bit more from the perspective of your trade partners. How that aggregated data can be used to strengthen relationships with trade partners. But first, if you think about in your ideal world where you know you had really good quality inspection data aggregated over a year, let's say. How important is that data for you to be able to look internally and say, Okay, where do we go from here?

What should we focus on next year? Where are some opportunities to get better? How do you think about that?

[00:21:49] Mike: We started aggregating data in different forms over various platforms and years with the company. But we're in the business of managing subcontractors is what it comes down to.

Okay. How we're able to influence our subcontractors through either our programs or our programs in combination with their programs is gonna determine the outcome of our safety programs on our jobs. I like to have hard data that I can show to people.

But, I want to have hard data instead of saying, Oh, so and so told us on a project. So, being able to present something to a subcontractor in a constructive manner, and not shoving it down their throat.

If you're able to have aggregate positive and negative observations that you can share with a sub, that to me is the ideal. And then talking about areas where they can improve. Not getting 'em on the defensive, but we're saying, Hey, real, this is real stuff that we saw on a job that, that if we feel your success rate will be greater if you address these things, and your frustration level's gonna drop if you're able to address these things.

We're starting to look, I shouldn't say starting to look now. We're actually implementing subcontractor evaluations at the end of the projects, and then the ongoing observations that we make. That's perfect world. All right? It is to have that collaborative relationship with your subs.

Now it doesn't always work that way cause some subcontractors are like, you know what? We're gonna do what we're gonna do. We've been doing this for years. And on our end of things, listen, we'll have we, there's been statements made.

Everybody's now, we're never working with that sub again. Maybe that's not the best approach. It's a much more sophisticated world than it used to be. I think people are a lot more open to, Hey, you know what? Let me look at what we're doing here. Maybe these safety people are actually right about this.

You have to have both. You have to have the positive stuff. Hopefully more of that than negative stuff, but there's nothing wrong with constructive feedback, and hopefully it doesn't come following some sort of bad incident.

[00:23:47] Dave: Yeah. I think you framed it in a really great way.

I think that Descope meeting is a perfect opportunity. At some point, you have an opportunity as the GC. You guys really value the relationships you have, right? So those conversations are coming from a place of, Hey, we have a really great partnership.

We value it. There are some things that you guys do really well, but here are some areas where we'd like to maybe see some improvement. How can we help? When you have data, when you can pull a report, and say, Hey, here's what our experience was last year. You guys worked on seven projects for us.

You did really well when it comes to executing in these areas, right? Working with scaffolding, aerial lifts, and scissor lifts. You generated a lot of good pretest plans. You executed in these areas, but struggled with some of these high-risk areas, right?

Whatever those are. And if you can sit down and you frame the conversation through that lens, about just like you would have an internal conversation with your own leadership, here are things we could do better. Here are things that we'd like to see you guys focus on next year. I think it's a really important conversation to have.

It does help strengthen that relationship. And when that contractor comes on the next project with focused areas to execute better, hopefully, all of those conversations and the planning that results lead to an even better result on the next project. And those are really, I think it's just a really important aspect of conducting inspections, aggregating data, and sharing data that might get overlooked. When you think back to how we started this conversation with, yeah, we do inspections because we know we're supposed to, or we're doing inspections 'cause our client has asked us to do it.

No, that's not the reason to do inspections. The reason to do inspections is the data you can aggregate is incredibly powerful, not just for your own organization, but in your conversations with your contractors. And it's just integral to everything we do. When people are out in the field and they're making these observations, there are some really important Face-to-face communication, coaching moments, recognizing good behaviors, all the type of stuff that comes along with it when you actually engage with people in the field. Just so much to be gained from implementing something like this the right way.

[00:26:14] Mike: The thing I've done too, and I've seen others do this. When I'm in the field, for example, this morning, I was recording some observations on my phone.

People always look at what's this guy doing? I'll tell him, like, Hey, listen, I'm going through and I'm making observations on your guys' work. Obviously, if there's an issue, I'm gonna let you guys know. But just to let them know what you're up to when you're out there, and just say, for the purpose of, we're trying to just identify hazards that we may not come across as we're just walking or working through, but to really focus on that.

And I have found that when you're able to share information with people. In the absence of stress, for example, during a descope meeting, or not in a meeting in front of all the other subcontractors. But with subcontractor management and even to a degree, to foreman and say, Hey, listen, these are some observations that we made today, not following an incident because everybody is very raw.

After an incident, or if there's some sort of a corporate audit where people are getting in trouble and being sent off the job or shut down, or whatever. But when you're able to have that information detailed, spelled out, and then you can hand to somebody and say, I want to talk to you about these things just in a, setting where you're not, maybe not even on the job, but to say, Hey, listen these are, some things that we've seen on previous projects all right. That, that we think you guys can improve upon. It seems to be a much more well-received than in a reactive way. All right. We had an incident, we're reacting to this. Oh, by the way, over the last six months, you had all these issues.

That's not the time to do it.

A lot of times, there's an out of sight, out of mind mentality with our subs, that when the job's over, alright, maybe we'll see it the next time around. But it's very important to have those interactions with subcontractors in between jobs and meeting for lunch, and going through stuff constructively.

It's all about improving situations. We don't always think in those terms, though. All right. I wish we did. To me, it would make sense to cycle our subs through all the time. And maybe there's organizations that do that, and we're missing the boat.

I think that data can just be very powerful as far as influencing future work.

[00:28:23] Dave: Yeah. Absolutely.

Any closing thoughts, Mike? Anything that you're looking to achieve with your inspection program in 2025? Any advice that you might give to someone who's either looking to start out and get going, and making their inspection program a little more sophisticated?

[00:28:41] Mike: How you communicate observed hazards and how quickly you get from the observation to the correction.

How quickly are people being notified, the responsible people, that something needs to be addressed? And then that lag time between the observation and the correction. You can decrease that margin just a little bit each year. That's great. And honestly, as an industry, we operate at the edge of failure all the time. So it's just trying to widen that gap, that margin, and if that's having a robust system in place.

And to be honest with you, I don't, all the years I've been doing this, I still don't know what to write. The best way to do it is. Somebody may say hard and fast. This is absolutely the best way to do it. I don't have an opinion that strong because I still have yet to see something that is the catchall.

Okay, we did something on our site, and okay guy's on his way to fix it.

Doesn't work that way. And focus on why you're doing these. At the end of the day, you're doing this if somebody doesn't get hurt, that's really what it comes down to. And have that end-user mentality. People get frustrated with trades, and they shouldn't. I've seen people take things personally.

[00:29:54] Dave: I've seen people be downright disrespectful toward tradespeople, all right. Because they did or didn't do something, and that's really where that's really the buy-in that you get from the trades, and the reason why you're doing this stuff is the most important thing for your safety culture. Absolutely. Mike, I really appreciate you joining me today, sharing some of your insights. Some of the key things that we talked about at takeaways is quantity of inspections doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a good inspection program, right?

We wanna make sure that quality inspections are getting done so that we have aggregated data that is meaningful. One of the things that I believe is that, if you want to measure the effectiveness of your safety programs or your management systems, if you want to measure whether or not your training is effective, if you wanna measure whether or not your pretest planning process is actually delivering the right outcomes.

Inspections and the data that you collect through conducting inspections is one of the truest measures of those things. It can help you identify where your opportunities are to improve, and it can facilitate some really meaningful conversations with your trade partners and contractors that you hire as well.

There's just so much value to conducting inspections. Certainly, if you'd like to learn a little bit more, reach out to us here at Highwire. Happy to have conversations with you. But in my experience and over the years, the inspection data that I've collected has allowed me to do a lot of really important things in the organizations that I was working for. Whether you're a general contractor or a construction manager doing $500 million a year, or you're a specialty trade contractor and you've got 30 employees or 50 employees, inspections can really help you. It can really help your business, can really help you execute, and can be a really critical component of your safety management system. Thank you all for joining us. And Mike, thank you, and we'll catch up with you soon.

[00:31:57] Mike: Sounds Good.

[00:31:58] Dave: All right. Bye-Bye.