Colas USA

My understanding of safety and my approach to changing safety culture comes from two places: firsthand experience in the field and formal study in ethnography and industrial/ organizational psychology. Having worked on the ground and in the air as a bridge builder, I learned early that safety is not just a matter of rules, procedures or compliance. It reflects how an organization thinks, leads and learns.

Two problems continue to hold organizations back. First, many still judge safety performance mainly through lagging indicators such as recordable incidents and injury rates, even though regulators including OSHA emphasize the value of leading indicators that show whether hazards are being identified and controlled before someone gets hurt. Second, safety is often treated as a technical specialty sitting alongside operations rather than inside them. When that happens, safety becomes a separate function instead of a shared way of working.

That separation creates a familiar and unproductive cycle. In many organizations, safety is managed at the middle-management level and seen as a necessary burden rather than as a core part of planning, executing work and continuous improvement. When an incident occurs, the instinct is often to look for the person closest to the event, assign blame and add another rule, form or tool. But quick fixes rarely last if they do not match the realities of the job. Over time, the new requirement fades, attention shifts elsewhere and the organization waits for the next event to trigger the same response again.

If leaders are unwilling to examine how systems shape behavior or to treat mistakes as opportunities for learning instead of occasions for punishment, safety will remain stuck at the level of enforcement.

Construction and other high-risk industries face an added challenge: senior leadership is often dominated by an engineering mindset. Technical expertise matters and knowledge of OSHA, NFPA and MSHA (and others standards) requirements is essential. But compliance knowledge alone does not create world-class safety. Research and industry guidance increasingly point to leadership, worker participation and organizational learning as the drivers of stronger performance. If leaders are unwilling to examine how systems shape behavior or to treat mistakes as opportunities for learning instead of occasions for punishment, safety will remain stuck at the level of enforcement.

My approach is to start with honest conversation. I work to create the conditions for field teams, middle managers and safety professionals to talk openly about how work is actually done, where risk truly lives and what support people need to perform safely. I am responsible for building the frameworks required for compliance, but I also believe the people doing the work must help validate how those frameworks are applied. That is where cultural change becomes real. Safety improves when organizations stop treating workers as the problem to control and start treating them as partners in learning.

For those beginning careers in health, safety and environmental roles, the priority should be learning how to measure what truly predicts safety performance: how well work is planned, whether controls are in place before work begins, how consistently leaders engage with crews and whether people feel safe speaking up. Stay curious. Spend time with respected field leaders. Ask them which solutions will work, which ones will fail and why. Test ideas in the field before presenting them in the boardroom. The future of safety will not be built by compliance alone. It will be built by organizations that integrate safety into operations, equip leaders to learn and recognize that the people closest to the work often hold the clearest view of how to make it safer.