BASF's Florine Vincik, center, presented at the 2019 Louisiana Safety & Health Conference.
"Live in the plant's reality." This is the advice Florine Vincik, senior EHS specialist in process safety expert services at BASF North America, recently offered her fellow EHS professionals.
In her 32-year EHS career, Vincik has experienced firsthand how safety professionals can become siloed, issuing decisions and rules to production as if from an ivory tower. This is a mistake, she said.
According to Vincik, the key to being a great safety leader is to understand production processes through firsthand experience, listen to field personnel about what works and what doesn't, and show everyone you care by implementing practical, low-cost solutions.
"Good EHS is the recognition and mitigation of risks with the potential to impact our employees, our company and the community in which we operate," Vincik said in a recent address at the Louisiana Safety & Health Conference.
BASF's EHS department recently surveyed customers for feedback about how EHS can better contribute to meeting production goals and plant objectives. A central theme emerged from the feedback it received: Safety professionals should spend more time in the field with their boots on the ground, collaborating on practical solutions to serve the plant's interests above all else.
With that in mind, Vincik recommended safety professionals be more proactive in the day-to-day processes of the plant. One important step toward meeting this mandate is attending other departments' meetings and safety walkabouts. What should EHS do if customers aren't inviting them to their meetings? "Invite yourself!" Vincik answered. "Get up from your desk, quit reading emails and go into the field."
When EHS professionals aren't in the field and don't "have a seat at the table," it's often difficult for them to design practical solutions quickly, because they lack understanding of the process, Vincik explained.
For example, Vincik noted younger, less-experienced EHS professionals are often overly conservative in their approaches to safety problems. "When you don't understand the process, you tend to go very conservative," she said. "But that costs money."
The goal, she said, is to gain experience and understanding of what is actually happening in order to avoid inefficiencies in production, whenever possible. EHS departments should mitigate risk as much as possible without impeding progress, and to do that, they must grasp what is actually happening in production processes.
Knowing what production is doing and why can mean the difference between helping and hindering. "Help us implement; don't issue a ruling and leave it to each team to figure out what and how to implement. Help us implement the ideas that really move the needle," Vincik advised. "We need more partnership to achieve real solutions and less governance."
Listen and mentor
There are a few ways to bridge the disconnect between EHS and production. First, safety professionals should listen to everyone in the field. "Tell them you hear them and will do something about it," Vincik advised. "But don't be afraid to say, 'I'm going to get back to you tomorrow' if you don't know the answer right away."
Vincik recommended mentoring young, up-and-coming EHS professionals to coax them out of being too conservative in their decision making, saying she personally keeps new EHS personnel "under her wing" for two years. Part of her mentoring process includes requiring those less-experienced EHS professionals to consult with mentors and more experienced colleagues before making decisions.
Most of all, EHS professionals must collaborate with production. This means attending production meetings and safety walkabouts, knowing their processes and goals, and listening to their feedback.
"Collaboration takes time," Vincik noted. "But it will ultimately save time when you get the feedback to make it happen."
