Kay Yoder didn’t know what field she’d end up in when she started college, but she knew she wanted to help people. At first, that led her to study pharmacy at Butler University, but she soon switched majors to nuclear medicine. After receiving her associate’s degree, she went to Tulane University to study something new — in large part because of her dad.

“I thought the healthcare industry was a good fit for me, but once I changed my major, my father expressed concern over my choice of profession,” Kay says in this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “His concerns stemmed from the fact that not much was known about the nuclear industry and about radiation exposure, and he knew of my passion for health and safety — so it was him that suggested I consider biomedical engineering.”

Kay currently serves as the Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety at Miami-based alcohol distributor Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, where she’s been for the past four years. There, Kay oversees a safety program that uses a simple but effective strategy to communicate safety procedures: emphasizing the “why” behind them. When leaders explain the reasoning behind protocols, she argues, employees are more motivated to follow them and feel like their employer cares for them.

Another source of motivation is the stories of employees who have been through accidents. Kay has given these individuals a platform to share their experiences by launching a “Safety Matters at Work and at Home” poster campaign. Every six weeks, her team shares a new story of an employee who was hurt on the job; they explain how their injury occurred and what led to the situation.

“In many cases, when you have a serious injury, it significantly impacts your family,” she says. “Sometimes they're going to have to care for you. Sometimes it's seeing your children having to give you a bath because you've been covered head to toe in burns. So it’s a very impactful story written by the employee themselves.”

Kay looks at safety as much more than being compliant. To her, safety is protecting assets, being inclusive, sharing a common goal, and speaking in relatable terms — and maybe even creating a new industry standard in the process.

Featured Guest👉 Name: Kay Yoder

👉 What she does: As the Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety at Miami-based company Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, Kay oversees the company’s efforts to reduce risk and ensure regulatory compliance.

👉 Company: Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits

👉 Key quote: “You have to be relentless, relentless, relentless because there are people who don't see it, but you can't give up because eventually there's going to be something that happens in that person's life or in the life of a coworker or a family member or some example that you give them that is going to hit home.”

👉 Where to find her: LinkedIn

Safe Takes⚠️ Everyone has to understand the “why.” If employees don’t know why safety procedures are put in place, those procedures become a chore rather than something they’re motivated to do because they understand their significance. Taking the time to explain the reasoning behind them also shows you care about employees and will help you gain their trust.

⚠️ Safety programs are for everyone, so keep it inclusive. Higher-ups might not be the ones doing the manual labor, but they need to be equally involved — just like employees at every level — in the safety programs and decisions. To work together effectively, communicate about safety in terms that everyone will understand.

⚠️ When your company is a leader in safety, everyone wins. It’s important to not only have buy-in from executive leadership when it comes to safety programs but to get those leaders to share your goal of setting industry standards for safety.

Resources⛑️ First linear accelerator in Connecticut –– This is the landmark achievement Kay’s father had a hand in. The article also explains other innovations in Yale University’s history.

⛑️ Siemens Medical Solutions — This is the company that recruited Kay to teach technicians how to use their diagnostic imaging equipment and, when needed, to service the equipment in hospital radiology departments.

⛑️ Best Practices — Read Kay’s take on how to safely reopen workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Top quotes from the episode:“Safety, as it relates to my role, is to protect the company assets. That includes our people, our products, our properties, our reputation. Being a leader in safety is an opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of others … assuring employees return home safely to their families every day.”

“I think that compliance is the bare minimum that regulatory agencies will accept for basic safety programs. So if you're only gonna shoot for compliance, then you often miss the mark. If the employees don't understand the ‘why,’ the message is often lost … because you're just telling them to do it because you need to be compliant, not why these regulations are in place.”

“It's really important for safety professionals to understand what drives their business and to speak the language of the leadership team versus trying to teach them our language, which is a little bit less familiar. … Put it in terms that they understand and can see what their return on investment is.”

“It takes a village, and the functions of business continuity — and, quite frankly, security — both have a really large safety component. … We have to make sure that safety and security work hand in hand to implement the programs to protect all of those assets. It's the same with business continuity. Their focus is on keeping the business open and redundancy for unforeseen business interruptions. So, it's a collaborative effort with the safety resources and the development of site-specific emergency action plans.”

“As we're seeing the new groups of people that we're hiring in, they're looking for companies that are differentiating in things like sustainability and employee safety. And they want to know that they're going to go to work for a company that cares about them, that has a flexible work schedule — potentially working from home options — being good neighbors in their communities … things like that, which we are as a company doing.”