Did you know ECS launched a podcast? Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up is meant to be educational, entertaining and encouraging with practical advice you can apply directly in your work and life. Listen and subscribe now on Anchor, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
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Intro
Steve Gosselin:
Welcome to Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up. An ECS podcast where we strive to provide a more personable way to communicate with employees. I’m Steve Gosselin, but you can call me Goose and I’m part of our senior leadership team. And I’m joined here by Julie Smith, who is part of the marketing communications team and our resident chocoholic. Say hi, Julie.
Julie Smith:
Thanks Steve. Hey, everyone. I’m glad you’re joining us today. So, Steve, what are we doing here?
Steve Gosselin:
Great question, Julie. One of the struggles with a company our size is getting a message to the masses where that it being diluted along the way. From projects and people to services and career insight, we hope this podcast helps provide an avenue to communicate the stories that are worth sharing. It’s to learn about our culture and feel more connected and to have some fun along the way.
Julie Smith:
So what you’re saying is we hope this podcast is educational, entertaining, and encouraging with practical advice you can apply directly to your work and life.
Steve Gosselin:
Well said, Julie, and that’s why you’re in marketing.
Julie Smith:
So grab a cup and settle in.
Our attorney makes us say this. This podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only. Nothing here and shall be construed as providing professional engineering services or used to establish the standard of care. This podcast and the comments contained therein represent only the personal views of the participants and do not reflect those of ECS. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions or correction of errors.
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Julie Smith:
Thanks for making the time to meet with us again, Matt, as we like to start every meeting, would you like to give us a safety minute?
Matt Koss:
Sure, absolutely. So the thing that we’ve been talking about in the standing committee and the safety, our general safety meetings this past month or so is driving, and it’s one of the things that everybody deals with, regardless if you’re a technician going work and going from job A to job B, or if you’re somebody going into one of the offices, administrators, that type of thing. Cool. It’s something very relevant, obviously because everybody deals with it and as a safety professional, it’s challenging because you’re in a situation that isn’t able to be controlled by yourself. You’re interacting with a lot of other people and a lot of other people’s decisions which can ultimately affect your safety. So that’s a challenging thing to do every day for our folks and it’s reflective in some of the numbers sometimes whenever we see motor vehicle accidents.
But the cool thing about that is the numbers of fatalities and injuries over the years have actually kind of staggered and leveled off. And I think that’s a testament to our auto industry and the folks that are building the roads and the engineers that design this type of stuff, because we have more people on the road, there’s more miles driven every year, yet the number of people dying in motor vehicle accidents has actually leveled off and actually went down at some point in the last 10, 15 years. So airbags, the crush zone or the [inaudible 00:03:22] zones of vehicles and how strong the roofs are of some of these vehicles. So in a weird way, it’s actually kind of cool. They’re becoming safer and safer and I think that’s a testament to some of the new thinking in motor vehicles and motor vehicle safety, instead of saying, we’re going to prevent every accident and injury we’re saying, when it happens, we’re going to give you a fail safe in a good safe product that’s not going to ultimately hopefully hurt you or hurt you severely.
Steve Gosselin:
All right, well, good morning. Let’s safely get this started. Appreciate that safety minute. And everybody today, we’re talking with Matt Koss, who’s our director of safety. He’s up in our Chantilly office. Matt joined us in the summer of 2021 as a director of corporate safety. Actually, he’s based out of Baltimore. He grew up in Pittsburgh, graduated from Slippery Rock University, decided to take his expertise closer to the East Coast. When he’s not working or studying you can find him watching sports like football, hockey, growing up in the Pittsburgh area that comes naturally and enjoying all genres of music or out camping with his friends and family. He’s currently pursuing his master’s degree in engineering, advanced safety engineering, and management at the University of Alabama, Birmingham online while he’s working full time for us.
So good morning, Matt.
Matt Koss:
Good morning. Thank you. That was great. Makes me sound really, really good. Steve Gosselin:
You are and we are happy to have you on the team. I know you’ve been here just for a short time, but I can speak for a lot of folks. So we’re really excited to have you here as part of the ECS team. So welcome to the pack.
Matt Koss:
Yeah, I appreciate it. It’s so far so good. It’s been drinking from a fire hose, but every experience I’ve had has been a good one. So I’m excited.
Steve Gosselin:
I have no doubt. All right. So we’re going to start with rapid fire and always got to start with food. So what’s your favorite food?
Matt Koss:
I’m a chicken wing guy. I know it sounds kind of plain, whatever you could pick from steak and barbecue and stuff, but I grew up in Western PA and that was a thing on Sundays, we’d watch football and have chicken wings so, and they’re better than Buffalo, Pittsburgh is better than Buffalo.
Steve Gosselin:
Yeah, good call there. All right, favorite sport or hobby.
Matt Koss:
Well, you kind of touched on it before, growing up in Western PA, it’s a football and hockey town. We try not to talk about baseball that much anymore, but definitely football, definitely hockey.
Steve Gosselin:
Okay nice, nice. Okay. Best vacation spot.
Matt Koss:
I would say Outer Banks and I say that because I grew up going to Myrtle Beach and Ocean City and Florida. I had family vacations all around there and I just went to the Outer Banks three years ago for the first time and it blew me away how different and relaxing and how much of a change of pace it was and I could see myself going there for years and years to come.
Steve Gosselin:
I love that place, it’s beautiful. What job would you be terrible at?
Matt Koss:
There’s probably a lot, but if I had to narrow it down, my wife is a teacher and I’m not sure how she does it because we have twin boys, they’re 15 months old and that’s just two. And she deals with 25 eight- year-olds. She’s a third grade teacher every day. So I don’t have the patience and I openly admit that I would be horrendous at that job.
Steve Gosselin:
Okay. What are you addicted to?
Matt Koss:
As weird as it sounds, and my wife will tell you, I’m addicted to growth and developing, and I’ve made it a part of my life and it drives her nuts most of the time, but just making sure that each day I’m getting a little bit better and making sure that I’m not backtracking it and what I’m doing in life and as a husband and family, but also, professionally.
Steve Gosselin:
Nice, always moving forward. What is something most people don’t know about you?
Matt Koss:
Ah, that’s a good question. Most people don’t know that I worry a lot. Most people think that I’m calm, cool, and collected in just about every situation. And for the most part, I think it’s pretty normal, but for the most part, I come off as just relaxed and, “Hey, everything’s going to be okay.” But I do worry. I worry about a lot of little things, but it’s normally not something that people see on the outside whenever they’re talking to me.
Steve Gosselin:
All right. Well, call me sometime. I’ll help you with that.
Matt Koss:
I might take you up on that.
Steve Gosselin:
I’m a long time warrior and I’m married to one as well, too so, we work on that all the time. Okay. So your career path is a little different than our technical employees. Can you share a little bit about your path and how you came here to ECS?
Matt Koss:
Sure, sure. Absolutely. Well, if you know safety folks, a lot of the times they have a story and they come from a background where something happened in their past that really made them passionate about becoming a safety person and getting into that role that’s just a bit different. It’s not really how I came to be in safety. I was going for my undergrad and I hadn’t decided on career just yet. I haven’t declared and in the summertime I was working for my, one of my stepdad’s construction companies. He was 38 years or so and so I made some extra money in the summer. And at one point it just kind of clicked where I was in construction and I was out in the field and I was seeing people, at times, unfortunately get hurt.
Matt Koss:
But then there was… I was in college and I didn’t have a major yet. So whenever I kind of mixed the two together and said, “Hey, they have a health and safety program at Slippery Rock.” And I took a chance on it and ever since then it’s been great because it checks all the boxes for what I want out of a career. Meaning you get to help people. You’re helping an organization. You get to work with people every day, which are, people are weird. I’m weird too, but people are weird and you get to work with all these people and all these teams and everyone from Tony and the folks that make the high-level decisions to the technicians that are pounding the pavement every day. So you get a mix of everything and it’s all good because you’re working with people and ultimately your goal is to make things better. So it’s been a win-win.
Steve Gosselin:
Great answer, man. I tell you, we’re really lucky to have you. I mean, that’s a great attitude and it’s really interesting story about how you got into safety. I mean, I would think all of us have a similar type story. It’s very seldom, is it something you just decide or choose, you kind of almost fall into it and then you feel the connection. It’s like, “This is something I could do.” So that’s great.
Matt Koss:
Yeah. It’s really weird how it happened, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Steve Gosselin:
Yeah. Good. So you mentioned a little bit earlier about growth and a commitment to growth and improving yourself. What have been the best resources, experiences, or opportunities in your career development, like mentors, professional organizations, training, education. What are some of the things that have helped get you here?
Matt Koss:
Yeah, that’s a great question and I remember talking about it last week with Julie, but I think the biggest thing has been the fact that I’ve had a couple of really, really good mentors. People that were in it for the right reasons, their goals and their vision are the right direction to go with safety that they’re humble, they’re level headed and they’re really, really technically sound. So it’s kind of like the whole package there, whenever you talk about somebody who you want to look up to and who you want to learn from. These folks have in a way they’ve pushed me and they’ve pushed me to get better, but they’ve also made sure that I was growing and I was understanding and some of the things that I wanted to accomplish, and a lot of those people I’ve met through professional associations.
Matt Koss:
The ASSP, the American Society of Safety Professionals is probably the biggest influence because that’s where I’ve met most of them and a funny story. I met one of them in Las Vegas at a safety conference, which is interesting that at safety conference is in Las Vegas, but I come to find out he lives four miles from here. I live four miles from him. I’ve known him for seven, eight, nine years or so now and it took me traveling 1,500 miles or 2,000 miles, whatever it is from Maryland to there to meet him and I could be at his house in two minutes, so it’s pretty cool.
Steve Gosselin:
That’s great. So, early on in your career, what skillsets or attributes do you wish you could have learned early on? What are some things that you wish you’d had learn right away?
Matt Koss:
Oh, yeah. Good question but I have a good answer though, too. In safety it’s all about relationship. So whenever I graduated college, I knew everything, just like everybody else, right. And I never quite realized, and I didn’t have the support at the time to realize like, hey, you’re not a safety cop. You’re not out here to bust these people and catch them doing things wrong. It’s really, really, really important to understand who they are, to understand what motivates them, to understand, “Hey, your spouse’s name. What do you like doing on the weekends?” And developing those relationships and understanding that how powerful that is. Took me probably four or five years and I went from being a certain way and having a certain attitude towards things to understanding what motivates people and most people were just out trying to do a good job and trying to do the best they can with the circumstances that they’re in.
Matt Koss:
And a lot of the times it’s not in their control. So, holding them responsible or accountable for things that really aren’t in their control is something that I was doing. But ultimately, having the realization, understanding that and understand that the people that I work with, if I would’ve known that from jump street coming right out of college, instead of saying you’re doing this wrong and it needs to be like this, I’d probably be further along, but at the same time, I appreciate the fact that I recognized that or others recognized that in me and kind of shifted my attitude.
Steve Gosselin:
That’s great. It’s a great answer. Yeah. And I know I learned similar things in my career as well, too, especially working with folks and managing or leading folks is almost always, the intent is good. People don’t intend to get in trouble. They don’t intend to do things wrong. They don’t intend to make mistakes, but a lot of it has to do with training and especially in the case of safety, repetitive training, and just talking about it all the time, it’s really an awareness thing. And if you continue to talk about folks and coach him up, then a lot of these things that look intentional, really people will understand that, “Hey, I’ve got to remember, I got to do it this way. It’s a way to keep myself and my teammates safe.”
Matt Koss:
Right and one of the thing, kind of hit me between the eyes and when it did, man, I was… I needed the weekend to think about it, but was when we were investigating different incidents and I’m trying to understand why people did what they did. Whenever I finally kind of took a step back, I understood and not just understood, but I thought, man, I would make the same decision if I was given those circumstances. And I’m somehow sitting here judging this person for doing X, Y, and Z. When, if you really think about it, if you’re given the same situations, same circumstances, same external factors and pressures to get jobs done and things like that, I’d probably do the same thing. And that kind of hit me right between the eyes. It’s like, wow, okay. I need to look at things a bit different.
Steve Gosselin:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s an excellent point and really an important realization for everybody listening today too, is folks usually do what we instruct them to do or what we train them to do. And especially with safety, I mean, this is your biggest challenge and probably your biggest worry is constantly getting the word out and making sure folks understand, how important it is to do certain things in a certain way, because we’re always in a hurry. We think we’re strong enough. We think there’s no danger there. We can jump over that or get around it. And yet, if you just stop, take a little bit of time, it’s not only going to save you from being injured, it’s probably going to save a lot of time as well too.
Matt Koss:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that’s an important point for folks that are listening to understand where my head’s at and hopefully where we can head and it’s probably a question you’re going to ask here shortly, but just to… When things do occur, when injuries and incidents do occur, I think the approach we should be taking to become a true organization of a learning team to get better. Because the reason that you investigate is to learn. You want to get better. You want to grow.
Matt Koss:
So an important point I think is to ask the question, why did it make sense for this person to do this in the time that it happened? What made sense to them? Because they’re probably not trying to get hurt. They’re probably not trying to cause damage to an ECS vehicle, but what in their mind was going on that said, yeah, this is the right decision. Like the fork in the road type of thing. Why did you go this way instead of that way and not a judgmental why, but seriously, what made you think that this was the right move to make and let’s figure out why that was going on and other things that influenced that decision. And that’s going to be where our true learning comes from.
Steve Gosselin:
Okay. So we’ll move on to the safety portion of the call, Matt. So, we were starting to delve into it, but in your words and for everybody who’s listening, why is workplace safety important?
Matt Koss:
I guess I would like to take the question and take a step back because it’s not just workplace safety if you really think about it, safety in general is important. And the numbers are pretty clear whenever you look at things that happen at home compared to things that happen at work and people are more open to taking risks whenever they’re at home. And maybe it’s because there’s nobody to watch and maybe it’s because, “Hey, I just need to do this real quick.” I’m not really sure. But whenever we look at safety being important, it hurts just as much to get hurt at home than it does to get hurt at work. And we have different exposures in different things that we deal with at work. But if you hurt yourself and you’re out of work, you’re not going to be able to provide for your family as much as you’d be able to, if you’re 100%. You’re not going to come to work every day and do the same job, you’re not going to make 100% of your pay, you’re obviously in pain.
And then the thing that people don’t understand a lot of the time is that affects a lot of people outside of yourself. Your spouse, your family, the people that depend on you to make sure that not just financially, but depend on you to make sure that that you’re able to provide a family, even things like going up and down the stairs, being able to bend over, to pick things up. When you’re hurt, these things really, really become challenging. Think about rolling your ankle or breaking an ankle. You can barely move. So if you’re like me and you have little kids, I’d be out of commission and my wife would, she’d be upset with me for making the decisions I made, that’s for sure. So I know I kind of twist that around a little bit, but workplace safety and being safe at home are similar in the sense of it still hurts.
It’s still important to make the right decisions, to understand what the exposures are that you’re faced and what the consequences of them can potentially be. And with some of the things that we do in training and that type of stuff, that’s where we’re at, where our heads are at to help combat those types of things. So I always say take the training that you use at work and use it at home. Anything that you can apply from here and take it to home. Safety glasses whenever your’re weed eating in the yard, things like that. I mean, it’s the smallest thing sometimes can make the biggest difference.
Steve Gosselin:
Well, I can tell you that I’m the poster child for not being safe at home. I’ve got lots of scars to show for it, but I know that it’s funny and I’m making light of it, but you make an excellent point. I wish you had been around and told me that about 30 years ago. How does the ECS make safety and priority? I mean, how do we take care of the team? How do we take care of the pack?
Matt Koss:
Well, I’ll give you what I know so far, two months in two weeks or whatever I’ve been here. So we’re pretty comprehensive with what we do. I think there’s ways to improve, but what we have built right now, our base with, our field audits for technicians and other folks that go out into the field and our monthly safety meetings. And geez, my calendar is completely full with different initiatives that we have, whether it be pre-site checklists to make sure that we’re identifying the hazards that are on site or incident reporting. And like I mentioned before, just understanding why they occur and making sure that we’re touching base with our team to figure out why things happen and what’s going on within our systems that fail to ultimately lead to that. So I think there’s a lot of good, we’re doing a lot of good, there’s a lot of different initiatives going on. The couple that I mentioned there have been going on for a while, from what I can tell and we’re just moving the needle forward, hopefully with what we’re going to be doing moving forward.
Steve Gosselin:
Excellent. So, in your words, what makes a successful safety program?
Matt Koss:
I think there’s two major components and I won’t go too deep into my thought process just yet, but I think management commitment and having worker participation are the cornerstone. And that’s not just me saying that. That’s some of the consensus and voluntary consensus standards that exist in the
U.S and internationally that the smartest safety folks in the country, if not the world have developed these things and the core is management commitment, in addition to worker participation. So you have management committing the time and the resources, the money to the safety program and saying, this is important, and we will be good at this and then you have the workers participating in the different processes and the different things that we have in place. So like safety meetings and audits and things like that, making sure that they’re able to feel heard and making sure that they’re able to participate in the program. So from there, there’s a ton of other things, but that’s the core in my mind. You got to have management committed to it, and you have to have workers comfortable with participating in your program.
Steve Gosselin:
So we’ll expand a little bit on that and just tell us how our employees, how our associates and teammates can demonstrate their commitment to safety.
Matt Koss:
Sure. I think the biggest thing… Because we already have them in place, the safety meetings and the field audits, whenever we have folks coming out or we’re meeting for the purpose of safety. I know we have safety minutes in each meeting, which is great, but when we have a meeting or an interaction that’s solely based around safety, this is the purpose of why we’re coming together, I think the biggest thing would be to speak up .if you see things that are wrong or you see challenges that we have, just be honest, candor is the name of the game in my mind. We understand, I understand things aren’t going to be exactly as advertised in our 425 page safety program. We’re not going to be a hundred percent all the time, but it’s more important to know that and it’s more important to understand what our challenges are through our people’s eyes than it is to say, why don’t we have a hundred percent compliance at every given moment at all times throughout the organization.
So my suggestion would be to speak up, to be comfortable speaking up. Sometimes it’s difficult. Sometimes when, if you speak up, you’re going to be that guy or that gal, but it’s ultimately more important in my opinion to make sure that we’re understanding and those things are being communicated than to remain silent.
Steve Gosselin:
So here’s your opportunity to paint a picture for us. What does the future of the ECS safety program look like?
Matt Koss:
Ah, good question. I don’t want to get bogged down in some of the details because there’s a lot, but in my opinion, I think there’s a couple of things that we could do to get really, really good at and to help us develop a way to continually improve some of the processes that we already have in place. I think the three biggest things that we already do, that we can improve on are our hazard assessment. So what exposures exist to our people. Are we dealing with falls? Are we dealing with excavations? Are we dealing with moving equipment out on site? There’s a ton of stuff, but how do we assess that? So I think that there’s ways that we can improve that, have a comprehensive system of here’s what we do in this situation. So for instance, an excavation. We don’t get into an excavation unless it’s properly short or benched or sloped.
So that’s what we do control wise when we have that exposure to make sure that it doesn’t cave in. From there, the second piece is to inspect it or to audit it. We call them audits here at ECS. So when our folks go out into the field, we should be looking at these things and saying, is this the way that we assess the risk? Is this accurate? We said, we would slow per bench or the contractor would slow per bench before we got into it, is that being done? So we’re able to measure the things that we say we’re going to do before something happens. And then finally incident investigations on how we investigate incidents and well, something happened whether we got into the excavation or maybe it sloughed off or caved in or whatever, we’re going to investigate that and say, well, we inspected it or audited it.
We said, okay, the controls were good. It was sloped or benched. And we said, we had a risk assessment and we basically listed what we would do. Something went wrong through that process, which is why we’re investigating the incident in general. So we need to understand those factors and those reasons, which is why it’s so important that our employees understand that candor is number one. We find out these things after they happen. We find out we’re not doing things after an OSHA inspection or after an injury happens. This is a way that we can get out in front of these types of things. If we’re able to assess risk, inspect or audit, the controls that we’re talking about, hopefully we can minimize those incident investigations that come after the fact.
So what I just explained, there’s a real brief continual improvement process where we can look at our operations and say, are we better than we were yesterday? Have we learned anything? And be able to put that into that system and that continual improvement process and know from day-to-day, from week to week, month to month, that we’re a safer, a better organization than we were last week or last month.
Steve Gosselin:
Excellent. So here’s the portion of our conversation. We’re going to ask you a couple of questions about things that we think our listeners would want to know. So tell us, how would you answer the question? What does ECS do?
Matt Koss:
I’m still trying to figure out everything, but I would say ECS is geotechnical engineers. We have many different service lines from facilities to environmental, but the bread and the butter seems to be the construction material testing and the geo-technical and the folks out on the construction sites every day.
Steve Gosselin:
All right. And what is one piece of advice you want to leave us with?
Matt Koss:
Ooh, good question. I would say that and it might sound preachy in a way, but I would say just to make sure that we’re getting better and I know I’ve touched on it a couple of times here in our conversation, but it’s one of the things that I’ve really challenged myself and I believe I’m not perfect, but to understand that, hey, in order to do more, in order to be better, I need to allow some of the things that maybe aren’t as productive to kind of burn off and force myself or challenge myself to do something better, because I know at the end of the day it will be worth it.
But man, is it hard sometimes, but just continuing to challenge yourself and make yourself better is one of the biggest things in my life. So far, at least it’s just been so beneficial to say, okay, I’m going to do this and I’m going to commit to it. Even know I like doing this and this I’m not going to have time for it anymore and I know that at the end of the day, the benefits are going to be there either for myself, professionally or for what I’m doing in my career for an organization.
Steve Gosselin:
Right. Thanks for sharing that with us. Okay. About time to wrap this up. We’ll fire one final question at you and then we’ll give you a chance to kind of wrap things up, but what fills your cup, what makes you happy and brings you joy?
Matt Koss:
I remember this question and that’s a good one. I would say before about 14 or 15 months ago, I would say solely professional development career wise, just focused on making sure that my career is in place and the goals that I want to meet and succeed at are all taken care of. But then my wife and I had the twins last July, and I would say everything that I just mentioned took a back seat to them. So they’re 14 going on 15 month old boys and man, are they fun. Not fun last night for two hours when they were awake, separately, not at the same time either, but they’re just… I never thought that being a father and becoming the dad of the situation would be so fulfilling, but God, hopefully I’m doing all right. But they’re what drives me and now at this point, they’re everything. So, that’s what brings me happiness.
That’s what brings me joy.
Steve Gosselin:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Anything else? Any final parting shots or anything else you want to leave us with today?
Matt Koss:
I just, I appreciate the time and the opportunity and anybody who could get on our system and outlook or wherever we can look up our contact information. I would just encourage folks to reach out. I truly look at safety and I’ve always looked at safety as we’re a resource, the folks that have safety around their name or a resource to the people that are billable, that are making money for the organization. I’m here to help us become better and fulfill some of our other goals and some of the other things that we’re looking to do, but if there’s any questions, if anything ever comes up where it’s like, well, I don’t know this, or I don’t know that, I know there’s resources at a local level, but I’m extremely, extremely reachable. And my phone number is out there or email address and everything. So just reach out if there’s questions and I’ll do the best I can to help.
Steve Gosselin:
All right, thanks for sharing it with us. Well, I just want to say on behalf of me and Julie, we really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. The conversation was excellent. You’re a good dude. You’re good guy and we’re lucky to have you. I really look forward to the difference you’re going to make for each and every employee with our safety program. But not only that, I think taking time and folks getting to know you is going to make a big difference. Not only for you, but for the company as well too. So thank you. Julie, anything you want to say before we wrap this up?
Julie Smith:
No, thanks, Matt. This has been great. We really enjoyed it and glad that we were able to chat.
Matt Koss:
Absolutely. Thank you guys for the time and thanks for taking the initiative on doing this. I really appreciate it.
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Outro
Steve Gosselin:
Thank you for listening to Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have an idea on future topics, guests, or are up for round a call, you can call me, text me, email me, just get in touch with me and I’ll get it to Julie and we’ll get it set up.
Julie Smith:
And for those of you that don’t want to play golf and you may hate talking on the phone, that’s okay. You can send us an email at ecsmarketing@ecslimited.com. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode.
Steve Gosselin:
Thanks, Julie. Here’s to having a great day.