This is, this show is brought to you by safety. FM. The following program is rated for mature audiences. It may contain adult language, adult situations and frank safety discussions. The names in certain details have been changed to protect the safe and the unsafe. But believe me, every item in here is true. One of the worst things you have to deal with as a safety professional, at least in my opinion, is withholding information when people withhold information from you. So today's episode withholding information today on safety words with jim polls, all one of my pet peeves is when I have to deal with people who deliberately withhold information from me and from other safety people. Not only is it a form of bullying, but it also puts you and the workforce at risk your career, their safety, it prevents you from doing assessments, enforcing rules and policies, but also leading the workforce, places undue stress on you and when the groove no hits the fan, the safety department or you get high left holding the dirty end of the stick. As usual, it wouldn't be a safety wars episode without stories. I have two of them even though I have many on this. But I'll give you two. First story is when I was working on an environmental cleanup project for many years and had a specific contaminant that was very unique. The job was coming to a close. I was looking to line up another project. This one was going to be in an exotic location with the same contaminant as a matter of fact, the second clean up was the facility that took over from the first Job that we just mentioned 60 years before this. So they need a health and safety plan for that cleanup. I gathered up all the information of the project but allowing lee to me certain information was missing. The junior project engineer that was in charge of getting all the safety stuff together, refused to give me information. I didn't know about it at the plan. I wrote the plan presuming it was the same type of site, same cleanup process, the same contaminants and with all the other particulars, turns out I was right in the end he reviewed the plan and wrote a nasty grams saying, take this out, take that out. It seemed like the whole plan was one big huge red mark page after page after page, I revised the plan, then sent it back up the line and guess what happened. It got past them. But when it came to the final review, guy got saying, no, the final reviewer says, dude, you're supposed to have this in. It was supposed to have this, this condemn blah blah blah, basically everything I was told to take out was in there being a safety guy. I save everything. So I saved all the documents, showed it to this blah blah blah. And guess what? I was the one that got into trouble because I should have known that this guy was lying to me. Guy gets away scot free when I went off and I said, look, why did you do this? He said, well this is all baloney. The safety stuff. The contaminant didn't have an odor. So there was nothing where nothing to worry about. No one would know anything. Now you just flew the budget for that job, right? And plus he would not be on that job site. I will not be exposed to this contaminant. So he didn't care. Didn't matter to him. It's pretty foul that situation there. So it came down to money and being comfortable. This guy had no conscience. He didn't want to inconvenience the workforce. I don't know. But this is what it came down to putting people at risk. 2nd story, not as elaborate, but pretty messed up is I think more common. So you're on a site could be any type, it could be a manufacturing site, construction site, environmental cleanup shipyard. What have yet? Right. So that's when a project manager deliberately gives you out of meetings just to keep you off balance. So you're continuously playing catch up with low level stuff that can be handled if you had the right information to begin with, It's another form of bullying. So what happens here? What happens when the safety plan, the safety department, everything you're doing the culture, You can't do the right thing. You can't make assessments, make policies, place controls, make rules and I'm not a rule maker. But you know, sometimes you're gonna have certain rules. You can't protect your employer and you cannot protect the workforce. That's what you're there for us to protect people. So what do you do about this 1? Make sure you keep records on everything. Those email chains, phone logs, text message is very, very important. You have to be assertive, stand up for yourself. Have a fact one. So look, I need to be in these meetings. I need to know what's going on here. Why? So I can better do my job because I tell you what the worst thing is to have a catastrophic incident where someone get hurt. They don't go home to their families there, diminish as an employee diminished as a person because somebody didn't include you in a meeting because someone decided, hey, we're not gonna go, we're not gonna plan for hazards. Everything is great. No one's gonna get hurt. We're gonna gamble. We're gonna gamble. Like we're playing the craps table here, We're going to roll the dice every time. That's not a situation you want to be in to do that because I tell you what, you know, who's going to be blamed in the end, it's gonna be the safety person. He was going to pay the price. The worker that gets hurt. The company that gets the lawsuit, the company that's how liable for things. The regulatory oversight, all this stuff is a drain. Here's something else to consider. You have a project budget, especially if you're a small business, you have a project budget to be a big business. Where do all of these costs come out of for paying for all of this? Those are tracked on a different line item that probably has nothing to do with this budget. So the person making these decisions, getting people hurt setting up a unsafe work environment, crapping on your corporate culture and everything else will never see the penalty of what he has done. It's usually a man that does not a woman. So they'll never see the consequences. They'll never have to deal with them. They'll be on their next job at the next company or the money will come out of some other line item on the budget. This is especially dangerous if you're working on a federal project. Right. We've talked about in previous episodes of people making decisions that have no liability. Well, guess what? Federal Project Manager on a Federal project has no liability. Their government employees, very strong protections. And guess what? They'll make decisions and I have a whole nother story for that That you folks are gonna love. It was 25 years story in the making and guess what? The people were never held responsible. So what's the moral of this story? You've got to win the safety war. You need information to do that. If you don't, you have to get that information, pursue that information for safety wars. This is jim puzzle. Yeah. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise. Without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, jay allen. Yeah.