The Return of Dr. Jay Allen

Safety Consultant with Sheldon Primus

Keywords: Jay Allen, Sheldon Primus, Safety FM, COVID-19, OSHA, ETS, Standards, Occupational Safety and Health, EHS, HOP, BBS, Corporate Culture, Safety Culture, Vaccine, COVID-19 Vaccine, Travel, Safety FM Plus, Safety Consultant TV, Government, Regulations, Recordkeeping, OSHA Recordkeeping, Field Operations Manual, Citations, Republicans, Democrats, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence
[00:00:01] spk_2: This
[00:00:05] spk_1: episode is
[00:00:06] spk_2: powered by safety FM. Welcome
[00:00:17] spk_0: to the safety consultant podcast. I am your host, Sheldon Promise. This is the podcast where I teach you the business of being a safety consultant. Welcome to another one of our shows. I think I'm also expanding to be America's safety consultant. Mhm. So if you do have a consulting issue or anything safety and health related, I want to be that resource for you as well. So not only those that are starting the business, but I know there's sometimes where you don't want to call a consultant or you don't think you can. Oh yeah, I got you. This week is going to be fun. So you guys have yourselves a treat. I have a special episode for you. It's actually an episode where it's gonna be me and I am going to be, come on, you're supposed to guess I'm watching you right now, guessing. All right. I've got J Allen today of the safety FM Fame. Dr J Allen is going to be with me today. We're actually going to be just chatting as we do. And uh, it actually is part two of a two parter. He interviewed me first, which will come out tomorrow. If you're looking to this day of release, which is going to be May 17th Monday. If not, then you can listen to this two things anytime you want. But if you want to listen to jay, interview me, then you have to go into J ALLen show and you can get to it by Jalen show dot com or you can listen to safety FM. And you can actually see you're here, let's say my part of the interview right now, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go ahead and play where I get to interview J. Which is also great whenever I get to do that. So, uh, kick back, I'm going to talk to him a little bit about management and we're gonna talk a little bit about everything the way we always do. So hang in there and after stick around I had a quick little thought afterwards. All right, so let's get right into the interview.
[00:02:41] spk_1: She's a very nice guy like him. Okay, so I have agreed to torture. So should I say this out loud because I think I am right now already, I said that I would start and then I would let you and I will try to do my best to answer anything you got and try your
[00:02:56] spk_0: best not to start interviewing me. I actually said, okay, I'm going to give J Hansen of you without, without interrupting or not getting them into into mine. I actually was really, really my mind for, for working with you kind of opened up a little bit and truly, I am starting to to see a lot of the organizational things that you're doing behind the scenes, Yes, but even looking at some of the things safety FM and the vision that you have beyond that, what, what changed? Because there's, there's some action happening, what's, what's going on?
[00:03:39] spk_1: That's a very broad question. What do you mean? There's some action going on? I, I probably need a little, have a a little bit more specific, but I can understand what you mean.
[00:03:48] spk_0: Well think of it this way, you know, like when you have a little infestation and it starts in the kitchen with something and then all of a sudden you're in the bathroom and you're like, man, I'm killing this bug over here, safety FM seem to have been like coming out of the internet and all of a sudden, I'm like, hold on, there's a safety FM event going on right now and you know, who's so what? It seems like it's a concerted effort to expand the brand or
[00:04:20] spk_1: uh, that's that's a good question. That's a good question. It's not really expanding the brand. And I said that damn thing that I hate when people tell me that's a good question. Uh, I just said it, but that's the thing, it's not really about expanding the brand, I would say, probably expanding the messaging, I think what has ended up taking place is that we have gotten ahold of a group of misfits and I say that with love, um what kind of got us all together where we can do different things at different times. The whole thing that I said from the very beginning and that has not changed is that I want people to have different viewpoints than what I have because I think that's very important. I don't ever want to be one of the, like the large organizations that you can only view safety in this fashion or you can only view organizations in this fashion. I think that it should be a conversation across the board and I've said it, if you come onto the radio station and you're taking a listen and your behavior based safety, I want you to be able to go into hop. I want you to be able to go into these other fundamental courses and even some of the stuff that we do that's not even safety related per se. Um, we're just conversations where I want you to take a listen from a different point of view. I never want to be known as the MSNBC s of the world or the Fox News of the world. I mean size wise, that would be excellent. But I'm talking more along the lines of
[00:05:37] spk_0: one thing.
[00:05:38] spk_1: Right? If I only listen to this because I go this way, I want it to be neutral where yeah, I can say one thing, somebody else can come on and say something entirely different and they don't have to align with each other. I just want people to be able to come out and hang out. Um, the other side of the whole thing, do we have a whole bunch of stuff going on at once? Yes. And that was, that was done by design. Um, I never wanted people to feel restricted of now that you're part of us, you can only do this. Um, if you have an event going line and you want to say whatever you want to say and we have an event going on on this side of the planet, You have another event going on a different side of the planet. Hey, those things happen. I mean, just because we do an event today does not mean that what some people might deem competitors are not doing an event on that same day. So I never have looked at it. I think that we do better when we join forces. Um, I mean, I think it's kind of interesting when we take a look around at some of the things that are going on right now, where I think four of us have started our own communities, quote unquote all at the same time, which I find kind of silly because I think that if we join forces and just did them all together, but everybody has to do their own thing, that they think that's in their best interest.
[00:06:45] spk_0: Yeah, well, that's a very honest answer because truly, in some ways, uh, it's it's a challenge if you will to, to unite for, for the safety FM family, which is great. I love that idea. I love that mentality anytime you call them. Like, I mean, I mean, let me check the calendar. I mean, uh, so the other thing that I kind of had me going and thank you for the honesty there. Uh, I was just thinking recently with the, uh, you know, the pipeline that was hacked and truly the gas in this area has gone completely ridiculous. There's a safety question here, hang with me. Uh, one of the things that they decided to do was to waive some of the drivers times so they can do over the road driving to deliver faster. Um, what's going to be our trickle down effect? The obvious obviously will be workers operating tired, you're one that's seen this industry on the, on the other side, what's the other things? The mechanisms that, that we may be missing as lay people in this field?
[00:07:57] spk_1: Well, I mean, here's the thing, you have to look at a couple of different portions here. Everything that you get with it being food, home goods, anything that you can imagine that normally tangible has to come through some kind of delivery. So that's the first portion. So any time that you start having constraints inside of a pipeline on how you're going to get things, it changes everything. I mean, we can go back and talk about the last nine months worth of wood on how there's been exception to that and all those kind of fun stuff, but let's not get into that portion. But what takes place that you're going to see is now, there's going to be different mandates on how they're doing their vehicle logs. That's going to be the portion of where they will be able to do the exceptions. But just because I get an exception on my vehicle log does not mean I'm not tired anymore. It does not mean that I'm actually doing everything that's correct. And let's be realistic the people that are out there that are doing these jobs that are very difficult jobs. They're going to do everything that they believe that they're doing to remain safe but also to get the work accomplished. Because if my vehicle because some of them have them inside of there my vehicle doesn't function after X. Amount of hours because they some of them have an actual trigger inside of them. I won't mention I won't mention any brand like starts with the letter Q. And to end with calm. But we'll just let you can figure out the rest. Um But I won't mention those because I don't want to start any trouble. But they do have actually some d. Activators from the actual one end. So you can deactivate the actual vehicle from it actually moving. So they're going to do everything possible to get that vehicle movie. Now there are some other logs which are now digital logs. They've been like that for a few years at least here in the US where they can say that they're on duty not driving. So they essentially say that they're working but they're not doing anything so they might be unloading a truck. But then they can put their off on a break. And some of these devices are not super smart where you'll say I'm on a break but you can still move the vehicle even though you're not on a break. So
[00:09:48] spk_0: now you're on a
[00:09:49] spk_1: Break, right? And so then all of a sudden, well there's some of them that are triggered that after you're waiting for. I think it's like 15 seconds and it depends on who's setting it up. It's considered on duty not driving. So it doesn't account against your drive time. So if you get to a few stoplights throughout all of a sudden, You know you were driving but you were technically stopped. I mean you still should have been doing all the the checking the mirrors and all that kind of fun stuff so it's gonna change everything but you're on duty not driving according to how that system sees it. Now, some of the normal is normally about 90 seconds. And let's be realistic if you're in a major metropolitan area you're going to have some long ass lights normally is the way that it actually works. So, so I think that you're, where you're going to see a lot of the issues going on and this is of course crystal ball question. Uh, it becomes one of those things where the fatigue and that plays, that plays a big factor into it and then sitting behind that seat for a longer period of time and then when we start getting into sleep or bursts inside of the inside of the larger vehicles they have them or not. I mean there's so many different exceptions just depending on what kind of vehicle did you have, I'll tell you, I normally will stop any amazon driver that actually comes, comes to my house and I'll ask how many deliveries are doing for the day and they normally kind of look at me like I'm crazy. The average answer ends up being close to 95, so that's 95 on just an Amazon prime vehicle. So I know that when it comes to these larger semi trucks, that's not going to be the numbers, But still, what is the mileage that they're going and keep in mind that most of the truck drivers of their owner operators, they get paid by the mileage is how it works.
[00:11:21] spk_0: Really. So incentivized to basically be on the clock longer or be on the road longer, correct? Do you think that this might have unintended consequences going to end up leading to if we could keep doing these variances on and off, on and off, why do we still need to have these variances and then eventually have some some other lobbying for the company to regulate their own workers hours? Is there anyway, of that even happening?
[00:11:53] spk_1: We'll think about it this way. Why does automation become part of that conversation? Because that's where a lot of people are leaning to. Why do you think the Tesla did so? Well, when they started talking about that, they're doing a fully automated semi truck. Now, I will tell you, I'm not even know if I'm allowed to talk about this, but I'll say it anyway, because who's going to say anything? I've actually been in a virtual version of the Tesla semi truck. Um, I was not allowed to take pictures. It was full headset, full VR. Um, I got to do, I won't say where I was, but I was at a lab, um, that actually supports the software and I was able to see what it actually looks like with the full automation on how it would work. Now, here's gonna where it's gonna get interesting when you start talking about fully automated actual vehicles, are we gonna start looking into conductors now? Because essentially that's essentially what you're gonna become because you're not really a driver and I'm talking full automation, I'm not talking autopilot, there's some confusion there between the two things. Autopilot is an assist to get you through. There were full automation drives, the whole thing by itself, they still want you to have some level of control inside of there where they were they were they would prefer for you to be behind the vehicle. But it's gonna be interesting because if you're self regulating and all of a sudden now you have a fully blown autonomous vehicle, how is that going to work? What's regulating it per se? The driver didn't fall asleep and I mean, and I'm not picking on it because I'm gonna tell you this is the backbone of America on actually getting good to us. And I love what they do. They have one of the hardest jobs. I mean think about it when you're driving for a long period of time on how difficult that is when you're trying to even for vacation purposes imagine doing that as for work purposes day in and day out and sleeping in the vehicle.
[00:13:31] spk_0: Yeah what kind of ergonomic issues you gotta
[00:13:35] spk_1: see. I mean I mean that's the thing depending on where you're at. You might have to depending on your health. You have to actually get a D. O. T. Medical card. I've seen them as low as three months and then as frequent as two years on regard to getting testing and you know size of your neck sleep. You know I mean they go through a whole cycle of testing that they have to go through to make sure that they are still qualify for, you know, a commercial driver's license,
[00:14:01] spk_0: wow. I guess if you're uninsured apply for one of those jobs and it's physical.
[00:14:08] spk_1: I mean it's one of those things that when you start taking a look at it, there's all charges associated to it. There's a charge for the ceo, you have to have that med card to be able to associate it. Now there are some um there's some groups that actually have their own version of A. D. O. T. Med card. I would say that there might be a fancy place in the Orlando area that has a mouse but let's not talk about the mouse that actually has their own version of A. D. O. T. Card. Now the way that that card works is really slick. If you leave the actual place that has the mouse, that car is no longer valid. So you have to actually go reapply for, it's not a difficult thing to go through, but if your health isn't as good as it once was, it could potentially become an issue.
[00:14:48] spk_0: Yeah. Yeah. That area is so incredible. I mean truly the jurisdiction in that is ridiculous because of what they, that the city that they have underneath the ears,
[00:15:00] spk_1: maybe I should start calling it the largest employer in florida. Maybe that would be the simpler way because the second largest is close to you. Um, which is always funny because they have the villages has their own tv station radio station newspaper and so on and the highest rate of stds and all of the U. S. According to years ago. I don't know if it's still the case
[00:15:21] spk_0: had a student and she pulled open the window and curtains for me to uh explain what's happening over there and like
[00:15:31] spk_1: Oulad,
[00:15:33] spk_0: wow! Another question is
[00:15:36] spk_1: just a great retirement community. I mean I'm not going to say otherwise. I would love to be there, but I'm not old
[00:15:40] spk_0: enough. Don't worry. Your time will come if you're lucky enough right? Like all of us that were lucky enough, our time will come and we'll be able to be those seniors and enjoy that. AARP.
[00:15:54] spk_1: I'll be in Mexico by then. Not new Mexico. I'm just talking regular Mexico.
[00:15:58] spk_0: No. Yeah, some people going there, it's ridiculous. It's a lot. I want to go. One of the things that I've got two quick questions just squeeze in here. Um one is on the management side because you're one of these people that are the organizational manager um guru because of your actual doctorate. Uh one you're thinking about dysfunction in an organization that is leading to high safety issues and now you're like the person that maybe the insurance company said we are going to kick these guys off insurance if they don't get their act together. What do you think you would say to the leadership or management that that will uh steer them towards safety culture? What are some of the management thing? We know some of the things you have to do. A safety officers such as the job safety analysis and doing more hazard assessments and auditing. We know the technical things to turn to ship. What about the things you have to talk to? The people that are in the big, big room, the people that are the higher ups, what do you have to turn
[00:17:16] spk_1: them? A lot of people are not going to like this answer because it doesn't really align with some of the things on how people see the world of safety. The first thing that I would tell them is get rid of your safety culture and that might shock some. And let me explain why I say that because I think that if you have a safety culture, it actually causes a small issue inside the organization because when you're starting to treat something as a separate entity, it's never going to be adapted and through the whole organization, if you start looking at it as part of your culture and you start influencing these things into the culture of your organization, I think it actually becomes something entirely different when you start looking at change management is really what you start looking at is how instead of having a safety person and nothing against safety person. Entitling. I think some of the credentialing and requirements can be slightly different. When we're talking about change management, where you start looking into those different positions inside of the organization, of saying, okay, this is a champion for change. And if you really want to look at how difficult it is to bring a culture up. There's a lot of paperwork on on the UNICEF website and I'll tell you some, someone that gave me a lot of that information was Andrew baker had a conversation with her and she referenced that. And if you look at how you have to do changes within a culture, you have to almost apply those exact same things inside of the organizations. So going a little bit deeper into your original question about how do you tell that to management? It's telling them exactly that. Get rid of your safety culture, just to see that initial shock on their face and explain why. But the other portion of that you have to keep in mind too is you have to meet people where they're at if I try to go in there and they have nothing and I say that they're gonna be cool with it. So you have to almost tailor it a little bit now here's the great part in bad part. Also at the same time normally when I'm talking to upper management they called me, I didn't call them. So they really want my honest opinion. Now they might sit there and argue about some of their ideas. But at the end of the day they called me, I didn't call them. So you called me for my honest opinion. You didn't call me for me to go. Let me agree with everybody else who's sitting inside of this room with you. It becomes interesting.
[00:19:26] spk_0: Yeah. Yeah that's tough conversation but truly they should appreciate that because I do that all the time. As a consultant. You you called me, what do we got to do?
[00:19:37] spk_1: I mean, and I know it sounds mean at times, but I get paid the same thing if you do it or you don't and I know that sounds terrible. I really want to see the change was inside of the organization, that's why I'm there. But also at the same time to the management or the C suite has to be open to the idea. I think one of the most difficult jobs inside of most organizations is middle management. It's the people from the C suite give the information to middle management. Middle management has to dispense it. I mean, it's it's a very difficult task because you can't make both sides happy. Not at least not all the time.
[00:20:09] spk_0: Uh wow, dropping some knowledge there. That I mean just like, boom, I should put that on my board. Right. I got to use that board board. Uh, last question for me and those, you don't know what I'm talking about the borders. I got this nice little road caster board that I have. I could do sounds such as my laughter sound or something like that if I really needed
[00:20:33] spk_1: to, Oh God,
[00:20:36] spk_0: can't laughter. Right. Uh, what jay allen Excites you right now. What is the thing that if you were meeting up with a high school buddy in nice covid friendly environment and they're like, hey man, what are you up to now? What's going on? What's going to be like coming out your mouth? What do you say?
[00:20:59] spk_1: Well, it's probably not going to be what you expect. I have learned over the last few weeks. The power of the power of turning off my devices.
[00:21:12] spk_0: That was good because I like
[00:21:14] spk_1: you know what your problem. I saw that it cut out. But the power of turning off my devices and being able to spend time with my family. And I know some people are like that's a canned answer. No realistically I have been able to spend time with my preteen and with my toddler and my wife and been able to do some things that we haven't been able to do before because we're always okay, work busy now, get back to the flow of things, let's have the tv on and so on. Now. It's been time of just spending time with them and it's not being stimulated by a new a new devices not being stimulated by something else. It's really being able to have that one on one interaction or that family interaction with them. And it's it's been interesting because it's not something that I I mean, and I've told you this before, I was previously married, not something that I enjoyed. I was always on the run run, run, run, run, run, run, run. Yeah. And now this has become something entirely different than I and I never thought that I would actually enjoy it. I always thought it would be something, whatever it is, what it is, but that's something that I really seemed to enjoy it. I also just think that it's probably because it has a lot to do that I'm getting old, so that's probably another factor into it.
[00:22:19] spk_0: Yeah, that's always a factor. Unfortunately, you're adapting and changing along the way as well. So my friend, thank you so much for for extending your interview where you can add me to interview you and you let me interview. that's even more rare.
[00:22:39] spk_1: I'm trying to make the attempt to do so I actually appreciate you actually taking the time to do this because I know that sometimes I can go a long winded, but I appreciate you giving all the information that you did and realistically people really need to reach out to you if they're running into any issues when it comes related to OSHA, you're always on top of that game of exactly what's going on. I normally hear the changes that are going on before anything else, anybody else tells me anything. Um, I normally hear him from your show, so I appreciate everything that you're doing for the people out there.
[00:23:06] spk_0: Thanks a lot. Well thank you, thank you so much. I really, um, it's a passion and I want to really keep up on it. So what are you gonna plug brother tell me what you got because I always put plugs on my show. I don't know if you do on your side, what's going
[00:23:19] spk_1: on here? Here's my plug. Go to the safety consultant dot tv and sign up to learn how to become a consultant. There you go.
[00:23:27] spk_0: Alright night, Nice. And then while you're there, open a tab and then it's put in safety FM plus dot com and check that out. Then it has been awesome, awesome, awesome. I love, I love those uh those around the pod world, awesome. But thank you man. Thank you so much.
[00:23:49] spk_1: Thank you.
[00:24:07] spk_0: All right, well, welcome back. Hopefully you guys had a good time. I had some fun with my buddy J and you only got like part of this. So that means you're gonna have to go wherever you're listening to me right now, as soon as it's safe to do it, go through the search feature and you're gonna look for J ALLen show. So it's a DR J ALLen show and then you want to listen to the other part of this where he interviewed me. So we talked a lot about compliance. Actually. He had a lot on his mind on OSHA and I just had to, you know, break it down. So that's really what we're doing. So we did a lot of the compliance side. So if you had a good time listening to us today, you get to hear both of us every day of the week. If you want to do, just download the Safety FM app and you can listen to it on any of your devices if you have not yet. There is the safety FM plus channel out there. So it's really cool. What jay is done in one of my favorite is around the safety pod where you get a whole bunch of little snippets and cuts from different podcasts in the safety world. So it's pretty cool. Uh, so that's a good way of getting a hold of him and I am doing an event. It is revealing the secrets to OSHA if you have not. So yeah, they're heard about it, what you need to, you just got to show them primers dot com backslash event and then you'll be able to get a hold of that one, such as Sheldon primary dot com backslash events. And before we go, I just had a little thought. I wanted to make sure that I let everybody know that I'm going to be doing a live stream. Uh, it's the OSHA compliance help show, it's still there. So my live stream is going to be, uh, livestream to twitch. Uh, also Youtube two channels, actually you to be able to be on the Youtube, OSHA compliance health channel or the safety consultant US channel facebook, if you're part of the facebook group, which is facebook dot complex lies groups with an s back slash safety consultant. No. S You have to answer three quick questions and once you do that, you are in the group. We've got just over 2000 safety professionals. Some our consultants, um, are people who act as the role consultant in their company, but it's a whole bunch of people. So check us out and its international, so it's even great. We're seeing people from all over the world. So that's facebook dot com back size groups with an S backslash safety consultant. All right. So I just want to give you just different ways of reaching out and being able to get a hold of me and if you do want to do that live stream on those things, it's going to be Wednesdays at five. So that's one stays at five. I'll be doing those live streams to just connect with me and you'll get this here anything that OSHA compliance as well as any questions from the people that are actually attending and do live questions in the chat box. So that's my invitation to you. All right. So I just want to make sure that you guys are going to be well aware of this thing and then we are going to come back next week. I'm not too sure what I can't go in. I should know by now, but I don't, but until then go get him. Yeah. Yeah. This episode has been powered by safety. FM mm. Yeah. Yeah.

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