How’s the transition going and what have you learned? 

Thanks to all of you in my network for your time and help over recent weeks. I’d like to share Volume 5 of my learnings from you with you.

Markets and Trends

Leading in the current Environment

One of my trusted career coaches and I had a long discussion and follow-up reading about leadership styles in the current and post COVID-19 world. Here are my key takeaways, which build on prior insights around crisis communication. 

• Lead by: Calm and deliberate decisions and actions; empathy NOT sympathy; credibility; and honest/ transparent /regular communication with embedded feedback channels. 
• Make sure business decisions are tied back to business purpose. 
• Use more video in communications as opposed to written or social media. 
• The phrase ‘new normal’ is getting cliche… how about ‘next normal’ instead? 
• Lead with a ‘hyper-clear set of priorities’ that allow hard choices to be made. Avoid a ‘buffet’ style of priority options that allow cherry-picking. 
• Employees will remember for a long time how they were treated during this crisis. First and foremost, act to safeguard employee well-being. When and if employees feel safe and secure, they will likely be more engaged in the actions needed to manage the business to the ‘next normal’.

Bonus feature on leadership and crisis management, in case you missed it: In ‘Managing Crises in the Short and Long Term’, Eric McNulty from Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative discusses how effective crisis leaders must at some point move consciously away from the adrenaline fueled immediate response. 

‘…one of the best emergency managers … he was very disciplined, but after an eight hour shift, he would leave and hand it off to someone else.  Which both modeled the behavior you want to see … and because it was a rhythm, it wasn’t like you were worn out or somehow weak.  …  the way the team functions best is for me to step back, someone else to step in and that has to happen across the roles.’

Eric McNulty

Markets

I’ve started to follow Amazon more closely, to see how the company is performing in the midst of the crisis. Their Q1 financials and outlook reflected big growth (revenues up 21%), but that growth came at a cost as higher people costs and COVID-19 measures ate into margins. Amazingly, 175K workers were hired in just March and April alone. The AWS business continues to be a profit juggernaut, accounting for $3.1B of total $4.0B in operating income in Q1. As more and more businesses move to the cloud (think videoconferencing, remote education delivery, big data, etc.), the need for cloud computing capacity continues to accelerate.

Tech

I have been exploring the current state of voice-to-text technology and natural language processing after seeing how efficient and accurate Otter.ai transcribes the audio in Zoom webinars. I tested Otter on my Macbook and the keyword analysis of your transcript is a very nice feature. This technology has promise in many fields, such as enabling quick capture and analysis of employee narratives from the shop floor. Voci’s voice-to-text and analytics technologies help call centers understand how to better interact and solve customer problems. Switching gears and following up remote technologies, one person in my network highlighted the work they are doing with Librestream. Their Onsite Cube-X intrinsically safe wearable camera looks very promising. 

On COVID-19, there is so much more to understand as the economy enters some sort of restart phase and more businesses begin to open. How are your employees feeling about their current situation? The rapidly developing field of employee pulsing and sentiment analysis using artificial intelligence (AI) could help organizations quickly assess at scale the ‘readiness’ of employees to return. I’ve just started to look into Medallia’s COVID-19 sentiment pulsing technology and see huge potential. I also took a deep dive into the biochemistry of the virus last week, with Dr. Glenda Gillaspy of Virginia Tech. Her webinar gave me reason for optimism as I could see how scientists across the world are rapidly and openly collaborating toward solutions. 

For the EHS Pros

‘Big data’ analytics in the EHS&S field is still in its infancy, but I see encouraging signs. In case you missed it, Owens-Corning and NSC’s Campbell Institute published an engaging white paper on this topic. As risk management professionals, we need to move away from fixed checkboxes that facilitate entry, yet limit data input flexibility, and make a move to contextual analysis. I see a future where highly tuned natural language processing algorithms can enable richer predictive insights.    

I promised to follow up with more of my learnings from Sidney Dekker’s book ‘The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error’. For those new to the concepts of Human and Organizational Performance or HOP, I encourage you to consider how to embrace the ‘New View’ of safety. I’ve outlined 5 comparatives below that resonate with me:

Old View approach	↦	New View approach
Who is responsible ?	↦	What is responsible?
Human error as a cause.	↦	Human error as a symptom.
Retributive justice: violations deserve punishment.	↦	Restorative justice: a healing response.
Accountability = exposing to liability or punishment.	↦	Accountability = holding to an account, allowing those involved to tell their story.
Hindsight perspective: view of the failure with perfect hindsight after the fact.	↦	Inside perspective: view of the failure through the eyes of those directly involved.

I also attended HOPHub.org’s weekly discussion group last week and heard about how progressive organizations are continuing to convene safety ‘learning teams’ online instead of together in a room. The mood of the group was that the online process is almost as effective as in-person. One of the challenges with facilitating online learning teams is creating the psychologically safe environment for front line workers to open up about how work is ‘actually done’ versus ‘as assumed by the organization’. What strategies are you using to engage your teams when you cannot meet in person? Leading organizations are retooling long established behavior based safety (BBS) observation rhythms, replacing them with ‘safeguarding conversations’ that embrace learning team concepts. We also discussed how technology can help, like Sense Maker.