The Safety Spotlight

The Safety Spotlight Podcast brings workplace safety leaders, innovators, and change-makers into the conversation. Each episode dives into real stories, proven strategies, and fresh ideas for creating safer, healthier, and more productive work environments.The show explores topics ranging from safety culture and leadership to emerging technologies and industry trends. Guests share practical insights, lessons learned from the field, and the human side of safety that drives lasting impact.

The Safety Spotlight is a business podcast hosted by BIS Safety, with 34 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

BIS Safety hosts The Safety Spotlight, a business show with 34 episodes published.

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  Episode #38

  Blame Is a Dead End: Michael Bassey on Where Accountability Actually Sits

  Sep 3, 202644 minS1

  A broken door handle nobody fixed will tell you more about your safety culture than your incident numbers will.Michael Bassey has spent two decades in process safety across Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, Argentina and North America, leading high-risk, high-consequence investigations. In 2010 he ran one that was thorough, detailed, and well received by leadership. Eight months later the same facility tripped again. Different shift, different people, same outcome. That gap is what he has been chasing ever since, and it is what led him to write Beyond Blame.In this conversation he unpacks why "human error" as a root cause stops the learning, why culture is "the soil that helps behaviors to germinate," how trust erodes over things as small as an unfixed door handle or a meeting you start fifteen minutes late, and what changed for him when a mentor sent him around every facility in the business unit for two months before he started the job.Michael Bassey, D.Eng, CSP, is an asset process safety advisor at Chevron in Houston and the author of Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadership.CHAPTERS0:00 "Trust is key and trust is fragile"0:25 Welcome to The Safety Spotlight1:34 From physics teacher to process safety at Chevron4:54 Leading across cultures: "people are people everywhere"8:53 The mindset you carry into a new country9:55 Beyond Blame: the incident that happened twice14:21 Why blame is a dead end15:36 Culture is the soil behavior grows in15:59 The broken door handle problem19:11 Why small unkept promises show up on the front line22:01 Operational discipline is for leaders too25:40 Closing the gap between the office and the field26:53 From "I Care" observations to real coaching30:44 The procedure step nobody follows32:05 What mentorship actually is34:09 The mentor who sent him around every facility37:43 Finding a mentor and building real competency39:29 Advice to his younger self42:40 Where to find Michael and Beyond BlameCONNECT WITH MICHAELLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmichaelbassey/Michael's book on Amazon:Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadershiphttps://www.amazon.ca/Beyond-Blame-Organizational-Performance-Investigation/dp/B0GRBVQWYHABOUT THE SAFETY SPOTLIGHTLong-form conversations with the people doing the work in workplace safety. New episodes regularly. Subscribe so you don't miss one.The Safety Spotlight is produced by BIS Safety Software.

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  Episode #37

  Safety Is the Accelerant: Brian Fielkow on Why Safe Companies Grow Faster

  Aug 11, 202656 minS1

  Ask a room full of employees whose job safety is, and plenty of hands will point at the safety department. Brian Fielkow got that answer when he bought his own trucking company, and he calls it the wrong one. Brian did not arrive in safety the usual way. He started out practising business law in Milwaukee, where meeting clients across a range of industries taught him to look for patterns. He went to work for his favourite client, a three generation recycling company, helped grow it, and sold it to Waste Management. After leaving Waste he bought his own trucking company and built it into a trucking, freight brokerage, and logistics business, and it was there that the role of safety came into focus for him, not as a compliance exercise but as the business itself. He has since written three books on the subject, most recently Making Safety Happen . In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Brian makes the case that there is no safety culture sitting separate from company culture, and that the safest companies have an advantage precisely because they are not spending their time cleaning up messes. Safe outcomes, in his view, are a reflection of leadership quality. He is careful to add that the best run company can still have a bad day, and that every organization he has led or advised is a work in process.

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  Episode #36

  Sometimes You’re Just Getting Lucky: Cody Woolf on the Gap Between No Incidents and Real Safety

  Aug 6, 202648 minS1

  Ask most organizations how safety is going and they will hand you their incident numbers. Cody Woolf would rather know what happens on site when the senior leaders aren’t there. Cody didn’t come to safety the usual way either. He went to school for law enforcement and criminal justice, then spent his early career in commercial vehicle enforcement with the Alberta government, pulling vehicles over on the highway and learning to have difficult conversations quickly. A friend moved into the safety world in 2008 and made it sound interesting enough that when a company offered to train him, he took the job with a plan to return to policing if it didn’t work out. Seventeen years later he has worked across civil and commercial construction, industrial, and now oil and gas and petrochemical, and he still says he has learned more from the workers in the field than from any course he has taken or book he has read. In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Cody makes the case that a clean record and a strong culture are two different things. He carries a line from his current mentor, that the absence of an incident doesn’t mean the presence of safety, and he is blunt about the alternative explanation: sometimes an organization is getting lucky. What closes that gap, in his view, is presence. Leaders in the field, conversations instead of emails, and follow-up that workers can actually see.

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  The Safety Spotlight

  Beyond the Checklist: Nicole Wesch on Practical Safety Leadership

  Jul 20, 20261h 3m

  What can safety leaders in construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing learn from a workplace where you can't pause an emergency to fill out a hazard assessment?In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Nicole Wetsch, Manager of Occupational Health and Safety for the Edmonton Police Service. Nicole started her career in medical microbiology and nanotechnology research before moving into policing, and she brings a scientist's discipline to one of the least prescriptive safety environments there is. She calls her team "safety unicorns," OHS professionals in a world with no ISO standard for the work in front of them.We talk about what it takes to protect people who are wired to look out for others before themselves, why functional beats thorough when a patrol officer's hazard assessment could run 200 pages, and how putting people ahead of paperwork built the credibility that shifted the culture.Topics include:Why traditional hazard assessments don't fit emergent work, and what replaces themHow EPS applied research-lab control banding to its early fentanyl and naloxone responseDesigning PPE that fits, and why building for women tends to benefit the whole teamForward-rotating shifts, sleep hygiene, and the long-term health cost of shift workMoving incident reporting from blame to root cause, and getting stronger corrective actions as a resultMaking the data-backed business case that earns leadership buy-in and resources

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  Episode #34

  Nobody Wins Alone: Ken Larson on What Real Teamwork Looks Like

  Jun 29, 202642 minS1

  Ask most leaders if they have a good team and they'll say yes. Ken Larson's answer is that they have no idea what a real team is.In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, executive coach Ken Larson explains why most "teams" are really just a roster of talented people working near each other, not with each other. We get into interdependence, the misfire vs. the mishire, why you get what you tolerate, and why a leader's behavior matters more than any core value carved in bronze on the lobby wall.

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