Why Your COIs Are "Useless" | Advanced Construction Risk Management featuring Robert Hudson Jr.

Folks like to hide things. Human nature, I think, causes us to want to do that. And so you have to be careful with disciplinary action. You have to reward, and not necessarily you're handing out any sort of accolades or whatnot when something like that happens, but really brag on folks and their integrity, and that takes a lot of time to build a culture of transparency. Hello, my name is Jason Reichel, and you're listening to Risk Management Brick by Brick. I'm fascinated with people who are helping build and maintain the physical world around us. On each episode of this podcast, we'll dive in with a risk manager, speak to them about how technology plays a role in this process. You're listening to Brick By Brick. I'm Jason. I'm joined today by Robert Hudson, vice president of EHS at Baker Roofing Company. Robert spent nearly two decades helping lead safety and risk efforts at one of the nation's largest commercial roofing contractors. Robert, can you set the frame? What does effective risk management look like in a business where safety, craftsmanship, and the operational pressures all collide every day? Oh, no pressure there. No. Let's just get started with the hard question. Get started with the hard question. So it's constant vigilance, building a strong team around you and just inviting questions left and right. And don't be scared to go down any single rabbit hole whatsoever and just surround yourself with seasoned professionals. Stay humble, first and foremost. If you don't know the answer, definitely learn who you can go and get it from. Yes. Great. Great. I love that. Yeah. That's what I really want to dive into, because one of the interesting things about your organization is how long it's been around. Right. So you've been around since around 1915. And when I was looking into it, one of the things that kept coming up is this, like, quote that's out there, like one of your founding values, which is, we shall do good work at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good work. How does that philosophy show up in the way that you guys approach safety and risk today? So that principle pretty much embodies the emphasis of the entire organization. And I will mention that recently. Yes, 111 years old. It is an honor and a privilege to work for Baker Reef and Company. Last July, we transitioned into an ESOP company, which is an unimaginable privilege now as we have sort of shared risk as business partners. And so all of a sudden, every layer of the organization, we all have skin in the game and reasons to manage risk. And so when you approach safety and risk as an organization and as you expand, how do you keep accountability and quality up across? You guys are one of these companies that are going grown from, you know, North Carolina to basically all the east coast and beyond. How do you hold up quality and accountability in an environment like that? I'm going to attribute a lot to our CEO Mark Lee. Mark, has he and Frank Baker maybe 10 or 12 years ago started corporate fundamentals, And I love those. And those are fundamentals that we concentrate on week by week basis. We start out every single meeting with what the fundamental is for the week, have a 10, 15 minute discussion surrounding that. So it's be accountable is one of those. Maintain your integrity, recognizing and celebrating good work. And it's celebrate the wins and let's take a good deep dive, look at the losses and learn from them and get better. I'm such a big fan of organizations that lead with values or tenants and then put that all the way across the organization. So when we look at EHS specifically, how does that show up for you? Where do you think these values align to that role? And then how does that value differentiate or make you different than other organizations in your opinion or advice that you would give to other organizations that want to be more value based in the work that they do, which can often just be pretty black and white from an EHS perspective. So let's dive into how that affects your world. So first off, you've got to have involvement right from the ground floor all the way to the top. And I think that part of what those fundamentals do and how we practice that is it gets people involved, it gets conversations going before you even start a meeting, and sort of sets the tone that we want. Everybody from the guy that just got hired on yesterday, or guy or gal, to the one that has the most tenure. But in addition to that, we actually created safety fundamentals that we go over from week to week on that. So principles like let it cool before you refuel, always inspect before you connect, don't move a muscle until you stretch. And just getting that constant, constant message out there on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. I like that. I guess when we're talking about environment, health and safety, that's sort of a big topic. So let's look at how does that look for you and your organization and your role within the organization. Be a little bit more descriptive for me there because we do a lot of stuff. Anything that you're searching for in particular. So I'm sort of looking for the tie into your Risk management process, your vendor, process safety overall. How do you bring all those teams together and how do you, I guess when you have such a large organization and you have so many different types of projects going on, what are some of the ways that you build those standards going from that value perspective? Those tenants, they're saying, but they impact the work from a day to day perspective. And then let's go through something that you're working on right now and sort of what the process looks like as you're standing up. Something new within your organization, new program, a new department, just anything that's around how you actually build your programs. People really want to hear how program building. Let me first start with our corporate safety committee. So that is about 75 members. Each department or office location has attended to that. And then they're responsible to go back and lead a local safety committee. And so we involve subcontractors of those things. So it's a cascading model. Sort of like you have the top layer and then each, each people bring it down to the office level or to the. Is it regional or is it the office level? Both. I mean we have probably 35 different safety committees across the organization, you know, 27 locations. But sometimes departments are big enough to have their own great. They have unique safety challenges or risk challenges within themselves, depending upon the type of work. When you're balancing the enforcement with empowerment, when you're building a company wide safety culture, how do you take that term enforcement with over empowerment or a lot of times people talk about how do you make it so that people are really encouraged. This was something you were just talking about, encouraged to bring things to the forefront and then how do you enforce those so that the encouragement stays at the forefront of the model? That one's a difficult one because, you know, the world that we live in, folks like to, we like to hide things. Human nature, I think causes us to want to do that. And so you have to be careful with disciplinary action. You have to reward and not necessarily you're handing out any sort of accolades or whatnot when something like that happens. But we really brag on folks and their integrity and that takes a lot of time to build a culture of transparency. I don't think any company has ever truly arrived, but it's, it's pointed in the right direction. It is a struggle within organizations to both encourage, enforce safety risk, anything, anything that gets in the way of the perceived work, which is like, I like to think of all of that underpinning the safety, the risk, all of that the quality at which the work can be built on. Right. And if you can bring that metaphor to life amongst the teams and really get them to be encouraged, that identifying the layers of that, good or bad, makes for a stronger build, makes for a stronger process, makes for a stronger team. I think that goes a long way to house, I guess, how durable and flexible a team can actually be. Because we all know when you're in the world of what you do and in risk, in the world that I'm in, that there's no work if you're not taking risks. There's no work if you're not doing something. It's risk getting out of bed every morning. Right. So you really have to bring that transparency and really foster a team that understand that that transparency actually leads to more success. And that's built on relationships. Exactly. So what are some of your tenets on how to build strong relationships with your own team, with executives, with your vendors on the outside? What are some of those core ideas that you bring? And when you're building those relationships, first and foremost to get trust, you got to offer trust. Right? And actually, or incidentally, this week's fundamental is be trustworthy for the company. That's slightly poetic, but when you're having department meetings and you're not afraid to bear your soul, if you will, I do believe if you are authentic with folks and you don't, and you share in successes, give away credit, but take the blame, you can very quickly build trust within your team. That's one of the things that I try to employ when you have someone new onto your team. Because this is a question that we get a lot from risk managers, too. Risk. Risk and safety are expanding. The things that need to be brought under safety, the things that risk managers have to worry about, you suggest maybe buy insurance. And now it's all sorts of things. They're in the world of AI risk and all of these sorts of things. When you bring someone in that's new to the organization or a new hire, how do you instill in them that transparency, that trust? How do you. Is it just by, you know, these foundation, foundational values and talking to them often and laddering the work that you're actually doing up to these foundations, is that how you establish that and say a new person who has not been with the organization for as long as others? So two parts to that. I really do think trust takes a lot of time to build. It's very, very, unfortunately, very easy to lose when you have a fairly well established culture. Let's just say 90% of the employees are bought in. As an outsider coming in, you adjust a lot quicker. You take Chick Fil A for example, and how those young folks come in there and they're just so quickly adopting or adapting to that culture and my pleasure and whatnot. So that's. We're chasing after that sort of dynamic. It's more like if the the ship is operating, the new shipmates fall into place pretty easily. I often find that one thing that we're not often talking about in the industry is that it's almost easier sometimes with people coming into it or into our own companies to adopt the best of the culture because that's what they're seeing. Right. Whereas when you know you have someone who's been in an organization 10 or 15 years and can get the job done, sometimes making those transitional periods are harder for them because they have had success in the old model. Right. Not to say that you guys haven't been doing this for a long time within your history of your organization, but I think that's one of the things that gets them mislabeled in the industry is that sometimes when you bring in young talent or fresh talent, they can actually get indoctrinated in your culture even faster and become AB advocates for it, which I've seen. Time, time again. That's right. So I've had a lot of success. We have about 17 professionals on staff currently that help me manage claims or manage onboarding subcontractors, and then, you know, 14 other actual safety professionals that are out there boots on the ground. And the ones that have the less tenure typically are the ones that are adapting a whole lot quicker. So here's a practical question. You know, in those meetings that you have with your team, how are you measuring success? Are you using like reduced incidents, engagement, near miss reporting? You know, what are some of the momentum KPIs that you track that kind of show you that you're aligning to that encouragement that you're talking about, but also shutting down incidents before they happen. What are some of those core things that you're talking about on a weekly basis in your team meetings? Well, it's fun to see, you know, an EMR drop, which pretty fortunate the last several years has come down, but that's more of a long term thing. I do occasionally share loss runs and recap reports with them, but we're looking at weekly KPIs with driving scores. We have to first drive well ourselves if we want to be able to preach that same message. Out there to the masses. And each of those guys lead teams there. So they're showing their own driving scores, so they're practicing what they're preaching. And of course, we're looking at how many, I would say inspections, but we like to call them checklists because we think the semantics matter. It sounds less of an R. Yeah. Daunting. Scary, right? Correct. We're looking at things like that. And yes, all of the incident activity and of course, leading lagging indicators, all the above. I really can feel very strongly, and I do a lot of these interviews and the values, the way that you lead and the way that the company leads is leaders need to show up like leaders and eat your own dog food, so to speak, which is a term that we use in the tech community. Can you talk through your experiences when you are talking to your peers? Because a lot of times people don't implement these kind of philosophies into the work. And it's just. It's very fascinating to me. Gosh, how do I start that? I've always been someone. This is not rules for thee, but not for me. I am going to. If I step foot out on the roof, the exact same expectation that I have on anybody else out there must apply to me. Absolutely. Or I'm the biggest hypocrite on the planet. At that point, I lose all my credibility. And that kills the trust. So many people in this industry say it's a relationship business, but they don't actually have what the relationship, how to manage the relationship. And that's what I'm getting in between the lines of us talking is that you have a philosophy for how relationships are managed, how you grow that trust. You know, not even thinking that, you know, one thing you were just talking about that trust part that made me think is people can be taught how to manipulate other people, but trust is something that takes time and energy and consistency to build. And seeing that in the way that you approach your work is very inspiring. So I just wanted to call that out. Well, thank you. I would also argue that nobody really had to teach me how to manipulate. Kind of comes out of. Of. Of trying to break those natural selfish tendencies. So good. Let's do some concrete wins and handling complexity. People like this section of the interview where we go through some examples. So can you give us a before and after example where a safety initiative or fix that you put into place materially changed in the last few years? We created a class we call risk mitigation. And I didn't do this by myself. There Were several people involved in this and just it's essentially our own content. And what we went after was the. All of the leadership within the organization, from a superintendent out there on the job site, project manager, department head right on up. And I have one individual on staff who's just probably the most dynamic trainer that you. You could ever ask for and also some younger guys that are following him along and just crushing it also. But going around and, and teaching this course and it is so well received as probably as the most proactive thing we have done in years and years and years. And incidentally, it prompted. I'll give you the result here. While the story that pops in my head is we got a call from our Florida office and it was about some deck replacement and this particular tenant or the building, they wanted certain amount of roofing deck replaced. The roof membrane was in good condition, but the deck was some spalding, so the gypsum was falling out in certain places. So we recommended nine squares. They wanted to cut that back to two squares. And so we're sitting there thinking, oh gosh, what could the ramifications of something like that be if we were to have a potential roof cloud collapse? So he picked up the phone and started the conversation with risk. And we're talking back and forth through it and by the end of the conversation he says, you know, I never would have called and, and caught this if not for that risk mitigation course. And so anybody has ever experienced some sort of catastrophe like a roof collapse. I think you can learn the value of what I'm saying. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I love that. It's interesting when you get everyone involved, how the ownership of that changes when you. When you change it from a function to a mindse. And I think that's what you're kind of elaborating on when you talk about having this training, the training put the conditions in. It's like when you buy a new Subaru as an example, and every car you see is a Subaru. It's sort of playing into that behavioral notion and that training that people have. How are you guys keeping that up? How's that program evolved and where's the next steps with that? So it's really. We've only been doing this for the last eight or ten months. It's yielded. I could tell you a couple more stories, but the part that I like about this one is this was a sales professional and you know, sales professionals like to sell, sell, sell. So that's what kind of blows my mind about it. Like Many companies sustaining something can be difficult, especially if the organization is growing footprints here and there. Changing of the guard, if you will. So that can be a real challenge for us. And so we've got a kind of a running list right now of we call it sort of a little acronym but for stuff that falls through the cracks and keep that running list and revisit that about once a month. That's also another great piece of advice. If I could just pull that out. Keeping a very tactical do list of the things that are falling through the cracks so that it's at least there. So that when you do have those moments to pick things up, it's already there and able to be processed. I think is a lesson learned. It's sort of like a risk log, but not really an incident or anything. It's just treating your process the same way people treat their risk log or any other kind of thing. Right. I think is a very valuable, easy. Any size organization can and do that. One thing you were talking about, as you grow as an organization, keeping things up is difficult. One of my heroes is an engineer named Phil Eisner. He used to work for the Goodyear tire factory and he coined the term silo syndrome. His job was to drive from one Goodyear tire factory to another one and didn't. Couldn't figure out why. When they were one of the biggest companies in the country, every office did it differently. And he realized as he was driving through Iowa the grains of corn, it was like, oh, everyone's in their own silos. Everyone means well. Everyone's trying to keep their part of that structure operational. And you have to kind of go across all of those silos with a mindset approach to the work. And so what you were just talking about reminded me of that, of how it seems like one of the major mindsets that you have within the EHS department is to break down those silos to build corporate culture across everything so that it's a more solid foundation. Am I right in sort of that mindset? But there's also a balance to that is because corporate doesn't necessarily have all the answers and it work that way everywhere. So it's a balance I think between the two. So allowing those organizations to solve some of their own problems and enabling that as part of the solution as well. Not just that mandate. Great. Let's train in culture. We talked a little bit about this. You mentioned this. But the 100% employee owned for your organization. How does ownership change the way that employees think about safety and accountability? Have you seen that's had a material change in how people approach the work. It's pretty early on to just to see the true benefits of that. ESOPs typically take three to five years really to start gaining some momentum. But we're putting posters up and things to slowly change the mindset with that. And that's been part of my message too. I'm really trying to capitalize on that as a risk manager or safety professional to, hey, remember, we're in this together. Every loss is a shared loss. It's not safety's problem, it's everyone's. When you approach the problem of, let's call that education, accountability, outreach to the organization. And since that sort falls under what you also do, do you think of that as one foot in front of another, or do you have like a plan that you're executing along that, or is it just about being reflective or reflexive to what's happening in the field? You're going to hate me for this answer, but I'd say all of the above. So there is a sort of guiding compass plan that's going forward and then you're reacting to it. So sort of creating container for it and to see if there's any durability breaks. I'm getting a lot of sort of design philosophy from the way that you're communicating here. And so I'm just trying to pull that out for the audience because I think what's really interesting is not just creating the plan and following the plan, but having that plan and then accepting all of the, let's call it the truth from the field, coming into that and hopefully making a better plan. You know, it seems very much like you're about that duality. Well, you make me sound a whole lot smarter than I actually am. It's mostly just hard to walk the walk. And that itself is a philosophy. So I really do appreciate that. Let's see what else we got. Do you want to do a little bit of. Well, before we do riskier. Too risky. Let me ask you a question. What's a piece of advice that you would give to someone coming into the industry today? We have a lot of people who listen to the podcast at university. What sort of advice do you have, 20, 26 coming into this industry? I'd say search for several mentors and soak in everything you possibly can, read everything that you can get your hands on and. But first and foremost is treat people with respect, treat people with respect and just be kind. That'll take you a long ways, I think, into perfection One thing I've learned about risk, having been in this industry now is sort of what you just said, which is get as much exposure to as many different sort of ways of thinking as you can. That way, when the incident does occur, you're not running blind. You have a little bit of. I think you can't under overestimate when an incident occurs that you've never experienced before, the human aspect of what that will do and how you have to think through that problem. And that experience is probably not lessened because you have mentors, because you have this knowledge, but I think it allows you to act from a place of more stableness. Right. Because you have had more experience in that. And I see that a lot of young people are afraid sometimes to say, I don't know this, or would you be like to be my mentor? So I think it's really important advice to find those people and sort of build that foundation before those experiences start to hit you, or else you'll find yourself underwater pretty quick. And Jason, I think we should call out the tenured professionals. Why aren't we kind of breaking that stigma and reaching out to those younger professionals maybe and breaking that ice? I agree, I agree. I totally agree. I think that the industry is in a right position for advancement. I think AI, I think knowledge work, all of those things will, the burden of all that work will become easier on us so that we can actually do what probably brought a lot of us to these career in the first place, which is we like to build things, we want to add to the built world, we want to make people safe. And all of those kind of reasons why we get into this stuff in the first place, I think is going to hopefully be able to shine. And I'm hoping that we're starting to go through a transformation as, as professionals within this industry, AI saves me a lot of time, but it will never, in my mind, replace the human element. Yeah, not at all. I 100% agree. All right, let's play a game of risky two. Risky. You tell me risky or too risky and your thoughts on it? I think I know how you're going to answer most of these, but they're fun for the LinkedIn, so let's do it. Prioritizing production speed, even over safety procedures. Risky or too risky? Risky. How do you balance those two things? This is a question that every time I put out there, what questions do you have? People, they always come back with, how do you balance safety or risk procedures with the very real job of what needs to get done you said prioritizing production speed. If I'm not mistaken. You know, anytime you get a production mindset to and you have a tendency to find corners to cut when it comes to safety or risk. Do you think that if you find that you're cutting those corners over and over again, is that maybe a signal or that the safety procedure itself might need to be more flexible? We might have a cultural issue more so treating subcontractor safety as separate from company safety culture. Riskier. Too risky. Gosh, we are pretty heavy on our subcontractors in our own boating process. So they go through the same things that. That all of our employees do. We have to be careful with that dynamic. Of course. Don't want to treat them like employees and blur the lines with Department of Labor. Yeah, I don't want to get you in trouble here. What I really mean is, does the subcontractor safety have. Be part of the company's safety in the way that it looks at it? Oh, yeah. Subcontractors, 100%. I find time and time again that something that separates the best organizations are the ones that bring that, especially if they're a larger organization. You know, GC hiring subcontractors bring all of those tools down to their subcontractors and essentially enable those businesses to be able to do better, bigger work by being part of that company culture from the very beginning. It's something I. We try to have summits with these guys and we try to invite their wives to come with them. Right. So we're talking about the risk that could potentially take by, let's just say, not being tied off. Working at heights. If the wife's there, they straighten up pretty quick. Right. I love that. That's the first time I've ever heard that, but I love that. Yeah. And we actually, you know, before we even onboard these guys, we're reading the entire full length CGL policy. The cois is basically useless, especially with all those exclusions or endorsements are potentially hidden within the policies. That's something I always push for too. So you guys do a pretty good job. Or you guys can enforce getting the full policy on it in order to review that. That's part of your onboarding process for subcontractors. Great. Every single time. Even at a renewal, who knows, you might switch to a different carrier. Who knows what agent or broker. Yeah, you might not even know. Right. I mean, let's. Let's be honest about some of these people. They just, they, oh, this is $500 cheaper a year or Something I'm going to switch. They say they have all the same stuff and then it's actually not the same thing. This happens a lot, a lot more than people think. Let's talk about relying only on annual safety training. Risky or too risky? Too risky for all the reasons that we've already said. Right. I mean, we really. We really nailed that home. And I think some of the training programs you guys are putting in there are examples of ongoing training fundamentally evolving the organization. Right. And I think that's a really important thing to call out. That's right. Robert, what's the biggest lesson you've learned about building a safety culture that people genuinely buy into, not just comply with? Oh, my goodness. I'd have to say without a doubt. Build a good team around you and trust them. Allow them to speak into your life. Don't necessarily be a dictator or armchair quarterback, whatever the picture you'd like to paint there. But it is learn and grow and be willing to admit when you're wrong. Don't be afraid to start something. Reassess if it's not working. Thank you so much. My team will reach out, let you know where this goes. You can share it on social media, of course, if you'd like to, but you've already done the hard work, so I appreciate you showing up. I hope to see you soon, my friend. Very cool conversation I'm very, very interested you guys have going on, so thank you so much. Well, thank you, Jason. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Risk Management Brick by Brick is brought to you by Trust Layer. Find out how Trust Layer manages risk so that the people can build a physical world around us. Head over to trust layer.comio and then make sure to subscribe to Risk Management Brick by Brick on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. On behalf of the Trust Layer team, thank you for listening.