When Safety Training Sticks: Turning Knowledge Into Action

Melissa Moss (00:01):
When you hear height safety excellence, what does that mean to you?

Jeffrey Moran (00:03):
Having the right tools, the right training, having the right equipment to work at heights

Melissa Moss (00:10):
Safely. Can you talk about why safety is important to you on a personal level?

Jeffrey Moran (00:14):
Unfortunately, one thing in my career that I never wanted to do, and I was.

AI Intro (00:18):
Meet Jeffrey Morayan, vice president of construction at Borrea Construction, a 30-year construction veteran who brings deep field experience and a passion for creating safety cultures where no worker gets left behind. Where do you see

Melissa Moss (00:31):
Well-intentioned training programmes fall short, and how do you fix those issues? I like

Jeffrey Moran (00:37):Asking why. Why did we do it this way? What can we do better? How are we going to get better? We spent all this time, effort, money to build this culture, to be safe, to have leadership engaged.

Melissa Moss (00:48):
How do you build that culture where the worker feels comfortable enough stopping a job when something's not

AI Intro (00:53):
Right?

Jeffrey Moran (00:53):
I just asked that one question. How many people.

Melissa Moss (00:57):
When it comes to height safety, training sessions are constant, but frequency means nothing if the training itself isn't effective and workers aren't learning the lessons they need to on the job. With such high stakes, how can leaders ensure that train sticks so that all of their workers come home safe at the end of their shifts? I'm Mel Moss, Guardian's Director of Marketing, and this is the Height Safety Standard, your definitive playbook for a safer, more effective work at height. Let's set a higher standard for safety starting now by turning training into action. Welcome to the Height Safety Standard where we ditch good enough and set a higher bar in height safety. Because when you take a 360 degree approach, the safe choice is the simple one. That's our gold standard, height safety simplified. But simple and easy are two different things, especially when it comes to making sure that every worker truly understands and applies what they've been taught.

Melissa Moss (01:57):
Today's guest has spent decades thinking about this exact challenge. Jeff Moran is construction vice president at Borier Construction USA, a general contractor with deep roots in the industry. Jeff has seen what it takes to develop a workforce that lives by the rules no matter the circumstances. Jeff understands the incredible importance of his work because he knows that every single worker is too valuable to their family not to come home. Welcome to the High Safety Standard, Jeff. Let's set a higher standard for safety by making training that sticks.

Melissa Moss (02:38):
Jeff, you've spent decades in construction. Tell us about your journey and when safety started becoming so important to

Jeffrey Moran (02:45):
You. Thanks, Mel. Thanks for having me on this very important topic in the industry. I think a lot of people speak it, not a lot of people live it, but that's when safety started sticking with me was being in the field, having those injuries, having those, thank goodness, not a life-altering injury for myself, but having those injuries where upper management just didn't care. It was just, "Hey, just go get fixed up and come on back to work." But over the career, I've also been in front of some organisations that actually took, the leadership took responsibility and accountability for the folks in the field, and that's what really made a difference to me in my leadership and wanting to do the same with the teams that we have, whether it was from my experience in T&D to currently now with Berea Construction. We have gone full circle from, especially being a Gen Xer, coming from, well, just get the job done, to let's make sure everyone's going home safely every day, maybe a little better than when they showed up and a little more educated on the topic.

Melissa Moss (03:57):
So it's really been a career for 30 years from one I'm not caring to one of now caring for everybody.

Melissa Moss (04:04):
Awesome. Our podcast revolves around the central question. When you hear height safety excellence, what does that mean to you? It

Jeffrey Moran (04:12):
Means having the right tools, the right training, having the right equipment to work at heights safely, whether it's from the transmission distribution side, working in baskets, buckets to even climbing structures and to antenna work as well as what we see every day in residential and commercial with working from heights and that safety aspect and making sure that the workers are properly tied off. We're talking to a guy that got out the service and went into roofing in Pennsylvania and after sliding down the roof two or three times realised this wasn't a career for me and went back to college and things have changed and it's great to see what our industry has done to be able to be in a safer environment, to be able to do your job safely. And quite frankly, when you go around the numbers from estimating and you're estimating these projects and I can remember the day where safety's going to lead to additional costs to one where you finish these jobs and it's actually quicker.

Melissa Moss (05:20):
It's taking away that mindset of fear for our workers because they know that they're one trained and doing the proper work right at height as well as having the right safety equipment to do it safely.

Melissa Moss (05:33):
Awesome. Well, and thank you for your service too, Jeff. We appreciate that. Can you talk about why safety is important to you on a personal level?

Jeffrey Moran (05:41):
Well, like I said in the intros, it's been. Or question one was I've been injured. I've had owners hand me credit cards and say, "Hey, just go to the chiropractor, get fixed up," and you're still living with that injury in my ripe old age. So I mean, it's one where you've gone full circle from being injured to realising this is not the right way of handling it to cover up, to hide safety issues, to not train accordingly. I've got a tonne of stories of how I worked previously unsafe because of the lack of training to unfortunately one thing in my career that I never wanted to do and I was burying somebody from a project and having a fatality on a project, that emotional baggage will never wear off. It'll be there with me for my entire career and I do everything every day to work these projects, to have the teams work the projects, to do it safely.

Jeffrey Moran (06:42):
It is key. We want to make sure we're not dealing with your loved ones in a hospital. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.

Melissa Moss (06:52):
Yeah, no, safety and training is so critical. How do you ensure the message resonates with everyone on the crew, regardless of language and cultural differences, today's market can be so different. How do you get that message to them?

Jeffrey Moran (07:05):
I think it's hiring the right safety personnel too. I mean, not only having bilingual training programmes, but having your bilingual safety professionals as well, and that is making sure that the message, what we do in our morning pods and where we're at, we're actually an international company. We work in French Quebec too, French Canadian, but we have French, English, and Spanish. So we have folks that are bi and trilingual that can actually speak all these languages and can translate the message in the morning of what our pods are, our safety message for the morning, what to look out for, our cots, near misses. So that's done every morning in two languages at least. Here in the South, it's usually English and Spanish. We get a couple of Quebec, it'll be French, then English. But that message starts with the boots on the ground is that no matter what language you speak, we need to speak safety first.

Melissa Moss (08:10):
Yes, you absolutely do. Where do you see well-intentioned training programmes fall short and how do you fix those issues?

Jeffrey Moran (08:17):
It's a lot of work. I mean, it's a career path obviously with a lot of folks, right? And it's one where you're always evaluating and learning, whether a position like myself to a safety professional asking the question. I like asking why. Why did we do it this way? What can we do better? How are we going to get better? And providing that training. But a lot of where I see issues is we expect folks that are in the field of working construction may speak a different language, and then we're trying to hand them a packet of information saying, now we're going to teach you on how to do X, Y, Z, and we're going to go through all these safety and expect them to stay engaged, expecting them to understand it, expecting them that this pamphlet that we put together in an office really meets and checks all the boxes maybe for OSHA and maybe for corporate culture, but not for the culture of the folks in the field.

Jeffrey Moran (09:22):
So we need to really understand, get down the brass tacks, and that is boots on the ground, folks that are there able to translate not only the actual language, but then also how to call it dumbing it down so that we take from these technical words into the lay person words and to make sure that these folks can understand truly and be open to questions. Well, there's a lot of times where you're in these meetings and the vice president of construction's here, no one's going to talk. Safety guys here, maybe they don't respect them. So it's really gauging your audience and understanding where it's working and where it's not working and making those changes. But the biggest one I see is really taking ownership of asking why and is it making the most sense for the folks in the field to be safe?

Melissa Moss (10:13):
Yeah, so let's take a spin on that one just a bit farther too. So how do you build that culture where the worker feels comfortable enough stopping a job when something's not right?

Jeffrey Moran (10:21):
I don't think we'll ever break that down. That's a tough one. I've been on a job where we did a safety stand down that morning, corporately, so every safety student, and I was listening. I was just in the back listening and just the director of Sam on this project and we're just listening and understanding what's going on. Somebody asked me to contribute, so I stood up and you know how it is. Nobody wants to talk, nobody wants to say much, and yours truly at times too. I got up there and I just asked that one question is how many people have been on a project that's had a fatality on it? When you see the hands raise, people start to look around. It's almost to the point where it's like when you ask about the military, there's a few pump pop, but man, when the fatality hits, all the discussions, the sidebar conversations that were going stopped and you got ownership because people realise that these folks have been on, from a mental standpoint, they've been on these things and then they deal with the OSHA responses, that corporate response, but then the loss of a coworker, the family lost, dealing with the fear.

Jeffrey Moran (11:32):
I mean, going in and seeing that firsthand and then being able to ask those questions. But to build the culture, you take it from there. Okay, what? It's not just you, it's not just me, but why can't you ask the question? Why do you feel uncomfortable to ask it? Everybody has a stop work authority. I walked into our trailer before lunch. I was preparing for an owner meeting and I listened to my QA guy talking to somebody on another job site and heard the question repeated to the individual, "Well, when do you have the right to stand down or stop work?" And I was baffled. I'm like, "What?" I'm overhearing this conversation and I had to go into the office and go, "Pardon me? You're asking the question or repeating it from this individual. He doesn't understand or she doesn't understand when they have the right to stop work.

Jeffrey Moran (12:22):
Everybody has the right to stop work at any time. Why are you even asking that question?" And it's fear of retaliation. So some folks, I mean, that's where that culture needs broken down is it can't have that fear of retaliation. We have all these safety. We spent all this time, effort, money to build this culture, to be safe, to have leadership engaged, and it's as simple as it takes one superintendent to destroy it all. So what they say about having toxic individuals on projects, they may be your best performer, but if they are not bought into your culture of care and your culture of safety, it's just going to lead to the very negative side and you're going to spend a lot of money getting out of that problem from the standpoint of somebody being hurt severely, if not from a SIF to a fatality.

Melissa Moss (13:13):
Yeah, very good. Where do you see AI making the biggest difference in your industry, especially when it comes to safety? Do you see that there's potential for AI to get into the safety?

Jeffrey Moran (13:23):
It does. It definitely helps with a lot of the standards, and then you can utilise a lot of it. I mean, being a little older, I mean, a lot of the folks that are engaging with the AI in developing programmes and asking it to do exactly what I was saying about bringing into the construction worker's philosophy and adding that verbiage versus the OSHA lingo, 1910, 1920, they don't understand all that all the time. Let's get it to their level of understanding. I think that's where it's going to help, generating training videos. Guardian's got this new unit, can you build me a training system to be able to put it together and to generate a video? And that's pretty spot on. It can take your document and build a training video with folks. I see it in that regard because I always see being a self-learner by example, by doing versus reading.

Jeffrey Moran (14:24):
It definitely helps with a lot of the teams to be able to do that via video, to go through the entire programme on height, safety harnesses to choosing the right lanyard, those type of things, and having it in a video format and you can watch it and you can definitely do it in multiple languages. I see that we're adding a very positive opportunity for our industry.

Melissa Moss (14:49):
That's a very good point. Very good point. When you look back on your career, what's the one thing you wish you'd known about height safety when you started out?

Jeffrey Moran (14:56):
How to choose a lanyard. It took a few years and I was just grabbing a lanyard and working, and then you go and look at the. Wait a second, I'm 10 feet up and this one's eight foot before it extends, so you're bouncing off the ground. And it's the training. With smaller firms, with the construction industry, the mom and pops as we call them, training was not a thing to the level as what we have today. Very positive, I guess, initiatives have been moved in OSHA to organisations, to our industry, whether it's in the electrical, construction, roofing, have changed the philosophies of these owners. I mean, you're still going to get some folks that just don't care, but the bulk of the individuals, whether it's people moving from company to company to an organisation that actually cares, they're bringing that safety culture in. So I think understanding how to bring training into it, to understand how to work with the products.

Jeffrey Moran (16:02):
Yeah, that's probably one of them was just getting the right training, not learning. I could

Melissa Moss (16:09):
Totally understand, really, with that too. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your commitment to bringing every worker home safe. If listeners want to learn more about Borier Construction or connect with you, where should they go?

Jeffrey Moran (16:23):
Go to borerconstruction.com. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Melissa Moss (16:27):
Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. That'll wrap up today's conversation. Thank you so much for tuning into High Safety Standard, where we're ditching good enough and setting a higher bar and high safety. Because when you take a 360 degree approach, the safe choice is the simple one. If you want to explore more ways to set a new height safety standard, visit guardianfall.com to explore our compliance resources, training programmes, and digital tools, including Gabby, your twenty four seven AI height safety assistant, or visit guardianfall.com/podcast to explore more episodes and get our fall protection inspection checklist. Let's set a higher standard for height safety starting now.