In this Longshore Insider Podcast, AEU's Mike Jernigan and Matt Hockman speak with QSL America's Safety and Compliance Manager, Rudy Becerra, about creating a safety-first culture through leadership and employee engagement.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the Longshore Insider podcast from The American Equity Underwriters. At AEU, we are passionate about helping waterfront employers protect their workers and their businesses. Join us as we explore practical strategies for improving workplace safety, effective claims management, and much more. So let's dive in. Welcome to the Longshore Insider podcast.
Mike Jernigan:
Hello, and thank you for joining us for the AEU Longshore Insider podcast. In this series, our focus is safety. Specifically, we're speaking with health and safety experts from across the maritime industry to find out what they do to develop and cultivate a culture of safety among their teams and within their organizations. I'm Mike Jernigan with the American Equity Underwriters, and today I'm joined by Loss Control Manager Matt Hockman, who is here to provide his perspectives on AEU's approach to safety, and Rudy Becerra, who is the Safety and Compliance Manager at QSL America. Matt and Rudy, it's great to have you with us today.
Rudy Becerra:
Thank you very much.
Matt Hockman:
Thanks for having us.
Mike Jernigan:
Rudy, tell us a little bit about yourself, specifically about your background in the field of safety.
Rudy Becerra:
Well, I've been working for QSL for 17 years now. I've done anywhere from operations to security. Safety is my main focus, and I've done it all. So, I've learned throughout the industry. I started in the steel mill industry and came to the stevedoring industry back in 2007, and it's been a great journey, especially working with people outside of the industry, right? So it's been a great journey, and I've done as much as you can dish at me. I'll continue to do it.
Mike Jernigan:
You mentioned QSL America. Can you also tell us a little bit about the history of the company?
Rudy Becerra:
QSL America was founded in 1978 by Denis Dupuis. He started with $10,000 and his credit card debt and grew our company to, I believe there's 65 terminals throughout Canada and the US. Chicago was the first terminal to open up in 2006. My boss, Steve Moser, took over in 2007 and during that time is when he called me to come join his group.
Matt Hockman:
So with all your jobs and experience and the different things that you've done, what inspired you to work in safety?
Rudy Becerra:
I was thrown in this, right? There was no safety manager when we started the Chicago operations, and my boss needed somebody to start heading that up. My background is mostly in operations, so he wanted me to look not only at operations but also at safety. So that got me started into safety is just getting thrown in there and understanding. I mean, my background was more in the general industry. Steel mills? Long Shrine was not even part of my vocabulary. So, it was a different change.
Matt Hockman:
The maritime industry is very different than any other industry, and we've got a lot of great people. We have a lot of focus on safety and going in the right direction. But there's a lot to understand and learn, especially when you're doing the stevedoring and marine cargo handling like you are. So, how do you ensure that your organization remains centrally focused and that leadership is among the priorities?
Rudy Becerra:
Well, I mean, it's the basis of any safety culture, trying to expand it, right? Trying to meet your goals, trying to meet what you're preaching. Leadership is key to getting the word out, right? It starts from the top leadership to middle management and down to our first-line supervisors, and that's who really enforces what our safety is and the culture we're trying to put out there.
Mike Jernigan:
So you mentioned that importance of the buy-in from leadership, which is obviously where it starts top-down, right? They've got to be on board so that the employees can be on board. But getting those workers engaged? Specifically, what is it that you do to make sure that you get buy-in from those workers on a daily basis?
Rudy Becerra:
Well, I believe we have three strategies to try to get our employees involved. One is through safety committees and also getting them involved in our processes, how to create new processes, how to make their area safer, right? The other thing we look at is training and education. That's a big part - an integral part of what we're trying to do at QSL America is continuous training, right? Trying to start thinking outside of the box to what new ways, what new systems are out there to give us that information. One of the examples is that we went from J.J. Keller to doing our basic OSHA standards. We're now using Moxie Media which helps us integrate some of the training that we already have and created to be able for them to do it online. We can integrate it with Moxie. So those programs are allowing us to get better education for our employees. And lastly, it goes to open communication for our employees. We have to have dialogues, we have to get them involved. We have to know what they're feeling, seeing and understanding. Are they understanding what we're putting out there. So those are the things that we feel have been a crucial part for our employee involvement.
Matt Hockman:
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's using the resources that are in your toolbox already, but it's also getting everybody focused in the same direction. That's so hard to do, but it's what makes safety so great is you can constantly evolve. So with that constant evolution, how do you identify the areas for improvement?
Rudy Becerra:
Well, we've used that analysis. We look back at our incidents, right? From anywhere, from injuries to near misses to LTIs, right? To lost time injuries. So we look at all this, we try to grab data out of those to see what we're doing. We do a lot of things when we have an LTI, and we do a stand down. So we shut everything down throughout our organization, and we perform these safety talks about this incident that happened; what do you guys see? So we try to get everybody involved. We also look at feedback mechanisms. We want to ensure that we're seeking that information back from the employees. That's where it's all key. It comes back from the employees. If we can get that information back, we will take that information to better our processes, better our systems, better the tracking, right? A lot of people are worried about shutting the operation down. That's something that we're working on now to try to change that culture and say, "Hey, even if it's a near miss, if it's five minutes, let's stop, talk about it, and move on, right? But do you understand what we're putting out there?"
Matt Hockman:
Well, the communication's going both ways at that point.
Rudy Becerra:
Correct.
Matt Hockman:
And it's empowering the employees to have a voice. As we all know, employees want to be heard, and if they're heard, then they tend to be a little happier and they understand that - you know what? My leadership team is focused on hearing from me, but also making the changes that they hear.
Rudy Becerra:
I agree with that. I do.
Mike Jernigan:
Well, and communication within your organization, what we're doing now, I mean all of this is part of spreading that message of safety to try to get everyone on board, right? You talked about overcoming things and working through problems. Can you give me a specific example of an obstacle that you've had to overcome and how you were able to do that?
Rudy Becerra:
Previous to 2018, we actually won the AEU Safety Award in 2018. So, previous to that year, we saw immense growth in Chicago, and we were faced with a lot of challenges. New workforce. Chicago doesn't have the longshoring mentality. It's not very much heard of up there. People don't understand what stevedoring is, or even longshoring, right? Our location is located right on the edge of Lake Michigan. And people that have lived there for decades, they didn't even know we existed or didn't even know that terminal was there, right?
So, leading up to that, we had a young workforce and our challenge was trying to get them to understand the safety aspects of working in a hatch, working on the dock, and working alongside with other vehicles and equipment. So, it was a challenge, but I think with the leadership that we had, and again, I always refer back to the first-line supervisors, that's where our key is at, and this is where we were able to succeed.
Mike Jernigan:
Well, you mentioned that your company and where you were located, people weren't familiar with that type of industry, and I'm sure that that exists throughout the maritime industry, right? There are so many companies that are breaking into different areas of this industry and different areas of this field. What advice do you have for other companies who may be in similar situations? How can they adopt some of these practices that you all put into use? What can they do?
Rudy Becerra:
So we've tried to create an onboarding type of new hire orientation where it gives the aspect of what we do. It gives the understanding of what a stevedore is, what hatches are, what the comings of a vessel are. We try to give a brief explanation of the whole process of what we do as a stevedore. It's taken us some years to create and put out there, and it's a half-day type of orientation that we use for our new hires. But I believe it gives them the understanding of, okay, this is what we have to face. Because in Chicago, the other challenges that we faced was, "Well, I'm afraid of heights." So, going up the gangway people were like, "I'm done. I don't want to." They walk away. So, we try to give them this information first, so they understand what they're going to be facing. These are the dangers that we face. These are the hazards - slips, trips, and falls. Anything that we do, it's heavy. Nothing is light. So these are the suspended loads, crane operation, forklift loaders, whatever the case is. This is what our industry does.
Matt Hockman:
You utilize a lot of different tools to make sure that safety is being the main focus consistently. I know you use a lot of our loss control managers and we try to help partner with you and make sure that you're getting what you need. And I think that partnership has helped as well. Are there some things that you've done with AEU that you feel like have helped you along the way?
Rudy Becerra:
Oh yeah. I mean, I've been attending these forums since 2008. So I've met a lot of people, and it goes back to listening to not only your inside group, but people outside of your company, right? And AEU has been a good partner with us at QSL and put in a lot of these procedures. We've piloted the LOOK Program. We were very proud to be part of it, the initial company to do it. And we utilize it now still. That's part of our onboarding. We use the LOOK Program, and I believe it's been well taken by our employees, and they like it, and we continue to push that, and we'll push it through all our organization. So, that's just one of the tools that I've used with AEU. But they've also done the lead program. We've done the lead program with AEU, and, of course, the reps are great. Every time I need some help, or I have a question, and they're very good and react pretty quickly to what I need.
Matt Hockman:
Again, it's a partnership.
Rudy Becerra:
It is. It is.
Mike Jernigan:
And speaking of that partnership that has been in these conversations we've had about safety, that has been a theme, and I keep repeating that because with every health and safety expert we've spoken to, they talk about all the different organizations that they partner with to make certain that safety is the top priority and that it's a success and that people go home safe. As you talk about these processes that you put into place, can you again dig into some of the difficulties and tell me on a daily basis a touch point that you might have with some employees as you go on a job site, something that you specifically see? Can you tell me how you work through those in a very specific manner? How can you, if you have some employee who may not quite understand what's going on, how do you guide that employee through and help them see the vision?
Rudy Becerra:
It takes a lot of communication. Going into Houston was a different cultural shock for me, right? I'm used to the Midwest and people didn't understand the stevedoring, so it was easy to explain and show them and mold them to what we were training, right? Houston was a little bit different because the industry is so big there that we have so many competitors that they came back and they were used to a certain way from a certain company. So that was our biggest challenge, is getting their bad habits out, right? We developed a great safety process in Chicago that we want to continue to pass on to New Orleans and Houston, and that's our biggest challenge. What we're doing there to face that is constant training and education. It's a constant discussion. Not only that, but it also, again, comes back to repeating the first-line supervisors. They're key to putting that education and that training out there - because we involve them in that. We give them that. We want to empower them to be able to do what we need them to do out there in the field, right? To be able to change that culture and have that, not only the enforcement, we don't want to do it by force. We want to do it by communication and by educating and by understanding what our employees need, right?
Matt Hockman:
And when you empower your employees, it's amazing to see how their attitude toward safety changes. I see it all the time, and it's unbelievable what an empowered employee will do for you.
Rudy Becerra:
I agree. A while back, I went through; I was new to my job, new to my role, a lot of training, not only the OSHA standards but a lot of the equipment, right? And we had one of our older gentlemen that knows it all, right? He's the one that, "I've done this for 50 years." Right? So, getting him engaged actually helped me with the rest of the personnel. He was our disgruntled know-it-all, but getting him to be part of it and to get his experiences involved in the training was key to everybody else understanding and saying, "Oh, if he's on board, I can be on board."
Matt Hockman:
So, of all the years of learning and all your time in the industry and probably some headaches, what's one piece of safety advice that you wish you could tell your younger self?
Rudy Becerra:
Listen, be patient. I think those are keys to success, to meet your goals, right? I was a hothead when I was young. I'm 50 years old now. So being that hothead and looking back and say, "Hey, just relax, listen, understand, see what they're doing, ask the questions, be patient." I think that would be my biggest takeaway to say to my younger self.
Matt Hockman:
That's a great piece of advice.
Mike Jernigan:
Because empathy is important, and I think that a lot of us know that. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of those people. And you've got to look back and think of when you were, just like you said, and remember, when you're younger, you can't teach us anything, right? We know how to do everything, right? And you get a little bit of age, and you start realizing, "Okay, all right." But our goal is to help them learn - and not the hard way. We don't want any safety incidents to occur to teach that lesson. We want to be able to really help them learn before anything like that happens.
Rudy Becerra:
I agree. I mean, it's taking the precautions, right? Preventative measures to get to that point. I also come from a military background. I was in the military for six years and that structure helped me in my job today. I try to put a structure together so it's not only easy to understand but also to follow. Because if they don't follow, you're never going to get your point across. You're never going to get what you need or meet the goals that you want to meet.
Mike Jernigan:
And to play off Matt's last question, there may be some younger listeners right now who are listening to this because the industry is trying to attract that generation, right? Because we need workers. Do you have a piece of advice that you would give some of these younger workers who are entering this field? What would you say to them?
Rudy Becerra:
It's a rewarding career, but being patient is key. I think our new generation wants things now, right? They want it today. They don't want to wait for tomorrow. I see an eager generation that wants to lead and move up, right? But they don't have the knowledge and they don't have the experience. And patience is the key to gain that experience and listen to the people that have been in this industry for a long time, because I've learned a lot from our workforce. We have personnel in Houston that have done this for 30, 40 years, and I talk to them all the time, and they have a lot of good things to say about how they used to do it and how unsafe it was in the past, right, to where we are today. Getting those people and listening to those people is key to the future success of safety in our industry.
Mike Jernigan:
I completely agree, and I think you make a great point. There's no shortcut to becoming an expert, and you're not going to get that overnight. In safety, there are no shortcuts either. And if you take shortcuts? Well, you know the results, and they're not very good.
Rudy Becerra:
No, they're not.
Mike Jernigan:
That's what we're trying to do today, is to help people learn how to push their safety programs forward, and again, to lead successful safety programs and keep people safe. So, I've enjoyed this conversation with both of you today. Rudy, Matt, it was a pleasure having you here with us, and thank you.
Rudy Becerra:
Same here.
Matt Hockman:
Thank you for having us. It's been great.
Rudy Becerra:
Appreciate it. I want to say as well, thank you. I mean to AEU, because they've really helped with our programs throughout the years, and I know they can continue doing that with all their companies that they work with. They put out good programs. They do a lot of great things, and I think that's key to getting everybody together. Even though we're competitors, everybody works together in this industry. So, I enjoy that.
Mike Jernigan:
That's right. What did we say? Safety is not proprietary.
Rudy Becerra:
Right. Correct.
Mike Jernigan:
Thank you guys.
Matt Hockman:
Thank you.
Rudy Becerra:
Thank you.
