Industry veterans David Bowman and Leigh Haas shared their extensive knowledge of creating and sustaining a safety culture in the workplace with EnergyGigs CEO Jason Assir. They discussed the importance of safety, human performance, and effective management strategies.
Meet the Experts
David Bowman, the Executive Vice President of Alliant Insurance Services and founder of Knowledgevine, brought a wealth of experience to the table. A US Marine Corps veteran, David has extensive experience in enterprise safety, energy, and nuclear sectors. His impressive career includes leading human performance training at Entergy and achieving a decade without an OSHA recordable at Chevron.
Leigh Haas, Knowledgevine's Director of Business Development, has a diverse background in politics, the energy sector, digital marketing, and congressional campaign management. Originally from Mississippi, Leigh joined Knowledgevine in May and has since been instrumental in driving business development.
The Importance of Human Performance
David Bowman highlighted the often-misunderstood concept of human performance, which originated from the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. He explained how the FAA assisted the nuclear industry in addressing human error, leading to significant improvements in safety. The aviation industry's systematic approach to safety, which resulted in a high productivity rate and a low crash rate, served as a model for the nuclear sector.
Linking Safety to Business Performance
The discussion emphasized the intrinsic connection between safety, company performance, and human performance. Safety is not merely a regulatory requirement but a crucial factor for business profitability. Accidents are costly, and balancing safety, risk, and profitability is essential. High-quality companies often maintain high safety standards, and effective management involves listening to workers and incorporating their insights.
Strategies for Contractors
The webinar also addressed the challenges faced by contractors, particularly when starting with new customers. Knowledgevine, a consulting company with 78 field coaches, emphasizes upholding values and integrity. Compromising values in a "race to the bottom" for contracts can lead to high insurance rates and negatively impact business. Training, using the right tools, and inspecting work are essential practices for contractors to ensure safety.
Watch the Webinar:
Transcript:
Jason Assir
Well, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, everyone. We're very excited for this month's first webinar of the month on creating and sustaining a safety culture in the workplace. We're joined by two esteemed guests, David Bowman and Lee Haas, both of knowledgevine. David Bowman is the EVP of, also of Alliant Insurance Services and also the founder of knowledgevine. Previously done a lot of work around enterprise safety, worked at energy in the nuclear sector. Has also worked across the energy spectrum and is also a US Veteran, was in the US Marine Corps. Lee Haas is director of Business Development at knowledgemind. Previously worked in land services for Doyle Land Services and also did digital marketing and also ran a congressional campaign for Gene Taylor. Really excited to have you both on to talk about this very important topic. It's the first month of the year and it's, you know, safety first. And so we always like to start off our first webinar talking about safety. And you know, I really like, if y'all don't mind, just like introduce yourselves a little bit or tell us a little bit more about knowledgevine and we can kind of get into the topic topic of, you know, creating and sustaining a safety culture.
David Bowman
All right, Lee, you want to go first?
Leigh Haas
Yes. So, like Jason said, my name is Lee Haas. I'm from Gulf coast of Mississippi. I'm the oldest of five kids. I come from politics was my original platform. And then I wound up in energy and worked natural gas pipelines, electric transmission, fiber optic, renewables for probably 10 years. And then this past May found myself at Knowledgevine and it's been a interesting and great ride so far and I can't wait to see what, you know, we can all accomplish together. So thanks for having me, Jason.
David Bowman
We're glad to have Link. She's got a lot of background knowledge and sales and marketing, and it helps us a lot because we have a, an interesting system we sell. That's not something everybody's heard of before. So my name is David Bowman. I'm the founder of Knowledgevine. I ran knowledgevine for 10 years before I sold it and sold the company to an insurance brokerage firm called Alliant Insurance Services. What they looked at was how we deal with standards and behaviors and how risk is introduced. We can get into that later for that. I worked 14 years for Entergy. I was in the utility sector for those many years, worked with all the contractors, worked at safety, worked as an operator, worked in nuclear power, transmission, distribution, some gas and enterprise safety. And I led the entire company 12,600 people taught them all human performance, something I brought out of nuclear power. Fantastic system. It made a lot of sense. We had the best year in the history of the company in 2013. Totally drove all of our accidents down, driving accidents. Our scores that you're measured with in the utility side of getting the meters back on poles to back up productivity is even the highest we ever had. So there's no trade for safety and productivity. There's a just an all around, you know, eliminate the human error, figure out the organizational gaps, that kind of thing that led me to start the company. I felt compelled to go out and do this for the rest of society, so to speak, with a lot of contractors out of the gate. Ten years prior to that I worked for Chevron and especially chemical side. I used to make styrene and so I worked in a styrene plant. And you know, before we came on, Jason, you made a comment about going a long time without an OSHA recordable. We went 10 years without an ocean recordable and you know, we didn't know how we were doing it. We had no thing to point at that said this is what makes this work other than we cared about each other. You know, we had a lot of great conversations. We did things like a strategy meeting every morning and talk about how the plant was going to operate. I learned a lot in those 10 years with Chevron. Went to the total quality management movement. I'm kind of dating myself now, ISO 9000 emergency response. I did all that stuff and then I went to nuclear power so that, that 14 years in the middle was all utility. The 10 years prior to that was oil and gas. But I got a really good collective knowledge of how people do what they do and how they think about what they do. Even myself, I'm a 20 something year old former Marine running a multi billion dollar styrene plant and having to make split decisions in a second on a TDC 3000 Honeywell system. Our operation, you know, I mean it's, it's dangerous work and it's scary work sometimes, but you know, the rewards were great. So I'm glad to be here. Jason, thank you for having us. We really do appreciate being a part of your webinar today.
Jason Assir
Awesome. Well, I mean there's so many interesting threads there and both your backgrounds, I mean, I guess starting off with like the idea of human performance, like I think that's a, that's a great sort of phrase, like tell me a little, tell us a little more about like human performance and how that service offering from knowledgemind and how it integrates with safety.
David Bowman
That's a great question. A lot of people don't really know what it means. And if you ever Google human performance, you might find us, but you're probably going to find kinesiology studies at Mississippi State University. Yeah, people, you'll come in and they introduce us, hey, here's the knowledge behind human performance, guys. And they think we're going to make them do push ups and sit ups, but honestly it's not that. Yeah, human performance something that was a very interesting story how it started in 1979. We had the Three Mile island accident up in Pennsylvania nuclear power plant almost melted down. The same exact week, interestingly enough, was the China Syndrome movie came out and scared everybody to death. So now we've got a real live reactor over here, hasn't having a problem and over here we've got a movie showing us how bad it's going to, you know, kill us all. So in 1979, again, I'm dating myself, but Jimmy Carter was the president. We were very heavy in the nuclear because he came out of Rickover's Navy. He was very much a nuclear proponent. And we were driving them hard to get them started up and running to supply power to the United States. A mishap happened and there's a, there's all kind of studies on this. We could go all day talking about it, but at the time they didn't have enough resources to figure out, okay, what's our true root cause. So they brought in the Federal Aviation Administration to help them with human error. There was no term for these things yet. They used to call it pilot error. But the aviation community had learned to get over, you know, crashing a plane 67% of the time and became a 99.99. I mean, almost six sigma perfect. I mean, yeah, nobody likes to fly, but the truth is, is that you have a six sigma on your side that you're going to get where you're supposed to be going and not crash into a mountainside. So if you think about the productivity rate of aviation over time and the crash rate over time, I mean, we rarely talk about plane crashes anymore, you know, so nuclear took that same approach and said, you know, we can't just say pilot error or operator error and this won't ever happen again. We have an organizational breakdown that's causing this. And so they dug deep into, okay, let's look at the psychology of what we're doing. Let's think about the science behind how the, how a human can Only handle so much information at one time and make 100% accurate decisions all the time. It's just impossible. So you have to put things in place to help humans get there. So what was born out of that? In 1979, you saw the B8182 time frame, we started talking about human performance, human performance. It's funny because it was going to be called something else, but they had to change it to human performance because that other phrase was taken. And it was basically about radiation protection. They called it HP health physics. They didn't want to call it human performance because they call it H, which is kind of a funny story. But that's what nuclear power did. They call it H instead of hp. So this human performance thing is really more or less a set of behaviors that you train operators to use and maintenance folks to use that are working in that plant to stop and think about what they're doing, get out of automatic, get deliberate about their focus, and then take those actions and get just that thing you're trying to get now. I grew from that over the last 30 years. It's gotten huge. There's a lot more to it than that. And look, we've gotten smarter as people. We've got more technology now, We've got more things going for us than against us. But we have a lot of distractions. So human performance has shifted from just the tools and the traps they used to teach to more of an all encompassing management system, if that makes sense.
Jason Assir
Yeah, I mean 100%. And I especially love like the your comment that kind of tags in my mind to back to human performance. This idea that there's not a trade off necessarily with company performance and human performance or on safety and to perform better. It seems like if you can keep everyone safe, you'll end up performing better too because lots of other things will be caught in that process. Is that right or.
David Bowman
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're really nailing down the specifics of that. And think about it like a three legged tripod, right? I mean, tripod has three legs. We all have to be safe. I mean, that's just part of it. You need to be safe. Safety is a good business. I mean, let's be honest, it costs a lot of money when you have an accident, right? You can't be so safe that you go bankrupt. You have to be profitable, make money. Right? We all are in business to make money. That's the way it is. So how do you, how do you fix that? You know the third part of that Is you gotta, you gotta make sure that everybody understands what they're doing. I mean, you gotta have rules, you got to have policies, you know, things that you follow standards. And so what you have to look at is, okay, where is the balance between being too safe or too risky or being so safe that you're bankrupt? So you have to really weigh that out. Now, the third component, the third leg, is really quality. And so when I was inequality, we talked about this earlier. When I worked for Chevron years ago, I went through the total quality management movement of the early 90s, ISO 9001. And you know what's funny about quality is that it's the same things that you have to do to be high quality, that you have to be high safety. And what I've Learned over time, 35 years of doing this, I've never found a very high quality company that has poor safety. And I've never also, on the converse, never seen a really high safety company. That's bad quality. The two kind of go hand in hand. And so when you think about how do you get there, how do you remove those elements that get you hurt or have bad product? It's kind of the same thing. You do what you say you're going to do. Have high standards, train your folks, listen to your folks. I mean, that's the hardest part we have in management, is to actually listen to the people that do the work. They have answers. We can't believe it sometimes that these folks are, are smarter than we are because we're in management, we wear suits and ties. Well, you know what, those people that do that work every day, they do know how it works. And they're gonna, if you'll listen to them and help them, you know, get into that system, to help the system get better, you're gonna get better. And that's where that safety, quality bridge really comes in into play. Now, I said all that to say this. You can't have high safety and high quality if you have a whole lot of human error, right? So human performance is the elimination or the practice of eliminating human error. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody out there turning a wrench is going to make human performance issues. But there's things that could drive them to make bad decisions. I'll give you a good one. You know, I worked for a company for a long time where I'd come in and I'd do, I'd do whatever I did out, out in the field. When I walk in, my boss say, good job today. Dave, he had no Idea what I really did all day. So all you really did was just reinforce whatever bad behavior I had. I may have been climbing in a pipe rack without a harness. I wear my hat. But he just told me, man, I did a great job today, you know, so we have to be careful that we're looking for and mentoring and shaping behavior the right way. We walk by it and we abide by it, and that's the way that is going to work there, you know, whether it be good or bad. So, yeah, I think that's the. That's the whole idea here. The whole concept is to eliminate that risk, to remove that human performance error or the error, like the situation, to make sure people are productive, profitable, and safe and high quality. Think about this. $107 billion a year we waste on human error. Can you imagine that? I mean, just people making bad mistakes, bad decisions, companies letting them do it and not looking inside to say, why are we allowing this? Why are we having this happen? Why do we have bad procedures? Why do we have the wrong tools? I mean, I see it all the time. Any. Any place you go, you can walk in and spot it. You have a person over there trying to put a tire on a truck for you, and they've got a big old pry bar instead of the right tool to do it. I mean, whatever. You can go to McDonald's and see these things.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
You know, and it's just. It's all around us, man. $107 billion. And guess what? It's all preventable every bit.
Jason Assir
I. I mean, I imagine for both of y'all, if y'all going into McDonald's or going just about your day to day, you're like, oh, you kind of have to close your eyes. You see all these problems all the time. I mean, I was just at a kid's birthday party on Saturday, and one of the people working at this is like one of those indoor gyms, and one of the people working there was, like, climbing up on top without any harness or anything. I was like, oh, my gosh, like, this guy's gonna die. Well, so interesting. I think, you know, in our community, we have both companies and independent contractors, consultants that work on energy gigs. And I'd be curious to get your sort of perspective on maybe looking at, like, first from the contractor perspective. If you've just. If you're a contractor, you're just starting to work with a new customer, like, what. What should you be doing in terms of thinking about safety for your own job? And you're. And actually the safety culture around, you know, the company that you're working at. I mean, what are productive ways to have conversations around, hey, this isn't maybe safe or along those lines.
David Bowman
That's a fantastic question. If you think about it. We're, we're a contractor every day for a client. I mean, Knowledgevine is a consulting company. That's what we do. We have 78 people that go out in the field and do coaching and, you know, all these things. We're out in the workforce with these folks every day. So one of the things that I do as the CEO or former CEO, but still the leader of the company is I have a one on one conversation with everybody that comes to work here. And I make it very clear that knowledge bond badge on the side of your truck might as well say David W. Bowman. And here's my phone number. Because anything you do wrong, I'm going to know about it. If you help somebody cross the road or help an old man change his tire, they're not going to call me and tell me that. But if you cut them off in traffic, I'm getting a phone call, they call me directly. So my, my point is this, is that we have, we have standards, we have, we have policies, we have rules and all that great stuff you got to have, right? But at the end of the day, you really need to have values. What do you value? And here we tell them what our values are. And one of the main things is integrity. You know, if you don't have integrity, you can't work for knowledge mind. That's just the way it is. We don't allow it. So you can't ever stray from your values, you know, just because a client needs something. Now let me back up one second and say this. There is an absolute situation that contractors get put into. Here, here's, here it is. I can do it for this amount of money for you, whatever that thing is. Okay. I could put a roof on your house. I can, whatever, right? I can, I can do whatever it is. Somebody inevitably is going to come back behind me and say, I can do it cheaper.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
Okay, so now we get into this, what we call a race to the bottom. This, this contract comes in, this one comes in cheaper. They might take a few more shortcuts. And it forces this contractor to start losing their values. Because to stay in business, I have to compete, right? What I try to tell my, my contract partners that I work with that work for big utilities and whoever is, do not do that. Because the minute you diminish Your values, you're going to lose the whole thing. It's not about losing this one job or that job. Your EMR starts to go up, you start doing more root causes than work. That's when we get into a real bond, right. So we tell people, don't diminish your values just to get that contract. Because, and look, I know I, I struggle with it because again, I'm a contractor. Okay. But I'm telling you, you will lose it all.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
If you get so far down that hole, because these, these other folks that come in and try to do it cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, they're going to find a way to get, get it done. And when they, you know, kill somebody and they get ran off property, you know what they do? They go start another one and call it something else. So it's a, it's a dangerous world. But you got to stick to your values. And at the end of the day, if you stick to your values, you do it right every time. What's going to happen is you're going to end up getting more contracts because now people are looking at your quality rating. They're good at your EMRs, they're looking at all your darts, trirs, all that stuff. And here's another thing that' insurance company bought us, right? Is you have to be insurable to work. So if your insurance rates are so high because you took all this risk and shortcut down here, it's going to catch up with you up here. So that's what I try to tell people and just stick to your values. Train your folks, get on the right tools, listen to them. And then here's the, here's the one I love the most. Inspect. What you expect. If you tell everybody in the company, I expect you to do this, they don't care one rip. If you don't go out there and go, see, that's just the way it is. Not to catch them and get them in trouble. But I'll tell you what I love to do is roll up on somebody that's doing something right and say, man, tell me what you're doing right. Show me what you're doing right. I appreciate this. And it goes so far. It just goes so far.
Jason Assir
That's, that's great. I, I mean, and as a leader of the company and leadership in the company, you know, you, everyone's looking at you to see, you know, how, how to behave and how to act, how to work with clients in a safe way. I mean, I guess another sort of, other sort of question I Think is if, let's just say you are a contractor and you're. And you are working at a company and maybe your business isn't in safety, but you're asked to do something that's not safe. Like what are. Like what are some strategies that a contractor should be thinking about and have at their back pocket, you know, to navigate that or push for safety, you know, in a place that maybe doesn't have a good safety culture?
David Bowman
Well, I mean, the thing is, most of the time, a big, A big client you're working for is not going to say to you to do something unsafe. They're going to imply time pressure, they're going to imply other traps to make you think that's what they want. Right? Yeah. I've never seen a big company come out and say, hey, man, I want you to take a risk and don't put your harness on and go up there and fix that. They're not gonna get them trouble. But at the end of the day, I mean, that's the people you're working for. You need to go find a different place to work. Because, I mean, I would never have a client dictate to me to risk my life at any level.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
Now, the other thing about that you bring up a great point is leadership in the middle. That's the worst. I'm telling you, if you're a supervisor right now, you've got the worst job you're ever going to have. It's the hardest job in the world because you got them biting you from the bottom and you got them chewing at you from the top. Supervision is hard and you have to make hard decisions sometimes. But I will tell you, the more, the more you invest in your leadership, your middle management, your supervisors and managers, to teach them how to handle these kind of situations. Right to where I'm not going to take this on by myself. When my guy comes and tells me that the client said to do this thing, we're going to talk to all of us together. I'm going to call the CEO of this company and I'm going to be empowered to do that so that I'm not going to risk the entire company for this. One bad apple was trying to make me do something, you know, incredulous. Now, I will tell you, empowered leaders is not something that happens overnight. This takes a lot of trust, and it takes a lot of strength building and a lot of mental capacity to where we have that trust. And we can talk like that, but you can't just throw somebody and look, we do it all the time. I was a super doer yesterday. I'm a supervisor today. I got zero training yesterday. Y'all, 12 of y'all are my friends now. Y'all all report to me and you hate me. So it's a terrible situation.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
And without some kind of a knowledge base and some kind of a skill set to teach them how to take that on and all the demands of the client, all the demands of their workers and the people that report to them, it is absolutely important, imperative that those folks get trained on how to, to have these conversations, critical conversations, hard conversations, especially up and down. Right. I think that's the key, the key to it. In my mind.
Jason Assir
That, that's, that's awesome.
Leigh Haas
Well, for.
Jason Assir
For all of our attendees here that, you know, the, the Q and A session section is open, so please do ask any questions that you have. I, you know, I, I'm kind of want to, like, chase down that thread on culture a little bit. Like, assuming. Let's just say you're now, you're new in the role of management or middle management, and you're so surveying your, your, your culture at your company. Like, you know, what are some telltale signs you've seen that are good examples of like a culture that's not really safe? I mean, obviously injuries like those incidents are, Are sort of, you know, are good signs, but other things that you've seen and then what. What are good approaches for someone new in a role to, you know, in leadership role to. To start instilling a, A culture of safety?
David Bowman
Yeah, I think that, that I never really look at safety. I'll just be honest with you. It's not my target. What I look for is what's the community communication strategy? What am I hearing people say and what am I seeing people do if those two things don't match? The first thing I do is listen to the supervisor even more, the foreman or the manager, and I try to figure out, okay, what are you actually saying and what are they actually doing? Because when you have a gap between those two things, you know, you've got a leadership issue. You know, because I'm going 12 people that were 10 people or five people that report to you don't know what you just said or aren't understanding what you're saying, or you're saying it because I'm standing there and I'm taking notes, and then you change and go the other way when I leave. I can pick up on that quick. So I think that the key to understanding what you just Asked is what are you hearing and what are you seeing? Right. Then I like to bounce that off. What does your standard say? Because if your standard says you have to wear a green hard hat for eight hours a day, Monday through Thursday, but changes to red on Friday, I need to see that. And if it's not happening, I need to understand why that's not happening. And I'll ask those questions to kind of go into that. But the thing is, is this. I think that any worker that works in any industry, you need to arm yourself with the truth, truth of knowledge. You need to understand what the policy says, what the standard says, what the rules say. Some people actually have procedures in their hands like a nuclear power. When you have that in your hand and you know what it says and you're actually physically doing what it says to do and somebody tells you something different, that's when you take a time out and figure out what's going on in management. Right? So, so I, I look at another thing is, this is going to sound crazy but you know, my first, my first jump into transmission, I was oil and gas and then nuclear. So I've been in the plant world my entire life. I've never seen a 500kV line or nor did I know what I did. Yeah, and I was the manager of safety for this thing, you know, and I go out there and I'm riding down this mat, you know, pipeline mats in a four wheel drive truck. And I get out there, I don't know what I'm looking at. But I'll tell you one thing I noticed right off the bat was how filthy everybody, everything was. All the trucks were filthy, there was housekeeping issues everywhere. That's another tell for me. I can pull up, so I've been doing this so long, I can pull up in a parking lot of a Holiday Inn and I can look at every utility truck in that parking lot and I can tell you who the best workers are. I don't know why, it's just the way it is. And I can tell you who the dangerous ones are. There'll be a lot of stuff hanging off their truck. A lot of things not last. A lot of things just hanging around. Their truck's filthy. The inside of the cab's got bottles rolling around and I mean, it's unbelievable the things you can pick up just in your own assessment of things. And even if you're, I think the question may even be that you're asking me, Jason, is as a worker inside of my own company, how do I spot this. Well, I'm just telling you, I can hear it even as, as I've been on different shifts on different crews in the plants, you know, because we work 247 and you can go from supervisor to supervisor or even board operator to board operator. And you can hear the difference in that culture. Who's saying do it my way. Who's saying doing it the right way, that's a big, big deal for you as an employee.
Jason Assir
Wow, that's, that's, that's great. So we've got two questions. One from Emily. As a leader in the safety organization, what is the best approach to get buy in to roll out a new work process or procedure?
David Bowman
That's a good question. I will tell you. There's a, there's a book I would recommend. I can't remember ex exactly what it's called, but I know it had something to do with this. It's the seven Reason Transformation Efforts Fail. Seven Reasons Transformation Efforts Fail. And I can't remember who wrote it, but it was a great book. And I learned this early in my career because I had to lead a big organization like you're doing to bring in new concepts. And I'll tell you, the one key you've got to have from the beginning is you've got to have a strong burning platform. There's got to be a reason that these folks are going to spend money, you know, and, and every, everything out there is going to cost money that you want to bring in and do right just the way it is. And I think the answer to that is I've got a strong burning platform to show the organization why we have to do it this way. We have to do it. The second part of that is a strong guiding coalition. Now I've tried both ways in a big company. I tried to work at grassroots and I tried to work at C Suite down. And I've never been successful. Grassroots up, it's always been C Suite down. Now there's some obvious magical things you can do in front of the C suite, like make it their idea. That's always a good way to get it. But, but going with your data, going with your facts, you know, the, the organizations over the years and in all industries have kind of changed. When I came up in the 70s or I grew up in, in the 70s and 80s, when I hit the workforce in the late 80s 90s, you know, most of people that were in the C suite had worked their way up for years. They used to be the painter and then they were the barrel guy and Then they became the pipeline guy and then they became the CEO. That's just the way it worked back then. And then I went through the 90s where it was engineering. We had an engineer that came in. This engineer was very smart. They became the plan operations manager, then they became the CEO. It was an engineer thing, right? So it was your Mavericks, then it was your engineers. And then the 2000s came along and it all became about money. And so the accountants became the people that were in charge. And they always make the comment that he who holds the gold makes the rules. So you got to know your audience. If you're talking to a C suite of accounting background, you need to be talking about the money it's going to save and the money it's going to cost. I'm just being flat out honest. Another thing I would do is use a lot of big pictures. They're very colorful and a lot of graphs. They like that kind of stuff. Right? So there's my secret.
Jason Assir
Well, that's, that's some excellent sales and biz dev advice as well there. Thrown into the mix. We, we have another question from Kazim. As a freelancer, remote worker, how can I be supervised? I assume that I'm working under you. Yeah. So I guess, I think, I think maybe from a safety standpoint, you know, I guess in your own personal environment, you know, you want to make sure you're working safely. Right. Like you're not, you're not taking a conference call while driving, driving your car, you know, ideally not. Right. Like you, you park and. But I guess other, other ideas for like just being safety safe around, around at home, if you're working remote, like what, what suggestions do you have and what things that you see that are issues.
David Bowman
I think Lee, you report to me and Lee works remote. What do you think?
Leigh Haas
Yeah, well, the first thing that came to my mind, Kazim, is we actually have. One of the services we provide is on site field coaches. We do daily observations with our clients and their contractors. So if you're ever interested and want to really be supervised, give us a, give me a call. That was the first thing that came to my mind. And you know, we also have Star Driver, which is this human performance behavior program for vehicles. So we do have some kind of avenues for helping with supervision for people that are remote. That was the first thing that I thought about. I think back to what Bowman said. It's all about your value. And, you know, I know when I'm working remote and you know, I'm traveling all the Time. He knows what I'm doing, and it's that trust. It's having that foundation of trust. And, you know, I think that's really what it boils down to.
Jason Assir
Interesting.
David Bowman
Yeah. Yeah. To Lee's point, you know, if you reported to me, one of the things we would do is we'd probably zoom call quite a bit. We probably text a lot. Lee and I text a lot, you know, and so we try to stay in constant contact the best you can. It's a very tough thing to do, you know, when you're trying to do the things that Lee's trying to do. Trying to do the things I'm trying to do. We stay very busy, and it's just. It happens to where you. You just have to figure out that time. To actually supervise you, though, that would be very difficult unless I, you know, I said, hey, let's get together. Let's go out in the field together. Let's spend some time together. Let's go, you know, look over some of your work or maybe come over to the office for a couple days or something like that would be how I would recommend maybe if you wanted to approach your supervisor with, hey, you know, here's some engagement ideas. You know, we can have a zoom call once a week, or we can do something once a month, or just see what they. What they want to. What their time will allow. But there needs to be somebody giving you feedback. I mean, at the end of the day, whether it's positive or negative, we recommend 4 to 1, positive to constructive, just to keep you wanting to work there. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you start feeling very disconnected from what I call the mothership. We have that situation here. I mean, I have. I have a lead team member that lives in Atlanta, you know, and he's very disconnected from the coffee pot talk and the things that happen. Lee goes through it, too. I went through it. When I go out and work a job with a client, I'm away from my own company, and I'm like, what are they doing? What's going on there? You know, selling all the couches, you know, I'm just saying, you know, I mean, it works on you. And we need, I think, humans. I'm not a psychologist, but I think humans need human to human interaction. It's very hard to work remote. It's a tough spot. It really is.
Jason Assir
Well, awesome. I mean, I think. I know we're kind of out of time. I just thought I had maybe one last question for both of y'all. And then we can leave it from there. But like, I guess looking into, you know, the beginning of the year or looking into the rest of the year in 2025, what are sort of main, what is the main takeaway that you kind of want to leave our members and our attendees with in terms of just working safely? Like, like to summarize and you know, what would you. What sort of last thought there?
David Bowman
Yeah, I'll, I'll go first. I think that if you're looking to do something different that you've never done before, this is not behavior based safety. It's none of that stuff. This is actual human performance from a nuclear power background. That's what you're getting in military. It's just shaping behaviors. It's working with the organization. If you really wanted to just not even call it human performance, that's fine with me. You could actually call it management leadership performance training. That's really what we're looking for.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
David Bowman
Just know that we have, we have a very sophisticated system to train this. It sounds very complicated. It's not that complicated. The way we do it, we like to do the heavy lifting. Lee mentioned a few products. We've got our own software, we've got our own stuff. We can help you if you're having just like, look, man, I've had five accidents last year. I can't do that again. Call me. Let's talk through it. We'll figure out a way to help you. We have online learning. We can do it remote, we can do it in person. We can do it, do it anywhere in the world. We're actually working offshore right now on oil rigs, doing coaching out there. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. So I mean we're, we're willing to help anybody that wants it and we, we love to partner with people. We, we don't look at you as a customer. We look at you as a partner. Right. We want to make sure that what you're going to get is a. My, my job is to give you return on investment if you bring me in, period. That's the way we look at it. We got a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me that work here. I'm just really good at picking a team. So that would be my, my thing to leave you with. Don't keep doing the same thing you did last year. If it's not working, do something different.
Jason Assir
Awesome. And Lee. Yeah.
David Bowman
Yeah.
Leigh Haas
So I think the main takeaway I would leave with y'all, with everyone is a Culture can change. A work organization can change. So when. Even when you feel defeated and you know that you're. You're at a dead end and you've. You've tried every avenue you can, I have seen it with my own eyes that they can change. And we have the process and the procedures and the tools to help do that. So even if you feel like you're at a loss, your culture can change on an individual level all the way to the entire organization. So just that's the main thing. I would want to leave this. Leave with everybody.
Jason Assir
Awesome. Well, that's fantastic. Well, I know we sometimes get requests for attendees and people in the network to want to reach out and contact you. Can we give people your contact information on the spot here? Like here, you know?
David Bowman
Absolutely.
Jason Assir
Yeah. Okay. Well, fantastic. Well, David Lee, thank you so much for sharing your time, your insight. I think this is an awesome, awesome topic, you guys. You know, drop so much knowledge on all of us. Really appreciate it. And, yeah, I look forward to staying in touch. And, you know, there's probably. There's a whole other world of topics that I wanted to get into, you know, at some point, like with nuclear now and data centers and, like. So maybe we'd love to have you back on another time.
David Bowman
Love to come back. Jason, thank you so much for the offer. Offer.
Jason Assir
Awesome. Well, listen, have a great afternoon ahead. Good day, everyone else, and thank you for attending this month's webinar.
Leigh Haas
Thank you.
Jason Assir
All right, bye.
