Josh Schmitz
Safety Director, CG Schmidt, Inc.
Josh is an experienced operational leader with a background in construction, occupational safety and health, firefighting, and emergency medicine. He is passionate about preventing workplace injuries and illness by understanding and improving human and organizational performance resulting in successful outcomes. Having started his professional career as an electrician apprentice, he knows firsthand the hazards that can be present at any job site and works hard with everyone involved to keep people safe and healthy. His mission is to ensure continued improvement of safety and health practices across all CG Schmidt projects and the industry.
Josh's sessions
A Positive Perspective: Remove the Negative From Safety
Apr 24, 11:15 AM to 12:30 PM - Magnolia C
Psychological studies have shown that the human brain gives more weight to negative experiences than positive ones. And when it comes to working in safety, there’s no question that the stress of the job can be all-consuming. Even the way safety is measured focuses on the seemingly negative aspects like incident or injury rates and reporting (near miss instead of good catch). It’s almost impossible to quantify what safety prevented because it didn’t happen. For example, we say we had 10 injuries last year, not we prevented 350 people from getting hurt last year. Shifting the message from negative to positive helps build psychological safety and people are more willing to share their challenges both mentally and physically, at work and at home. In this session, participants will work together in a positive thinking seminar to explore how to take the states, errors, and CERTs and put a positive spin on the messaging (with SafeStart cards) and discuss how to fight complacency by growing engagement.
Presented by
Josh Schmitz, CG Schmidt, Inc.