For safety veteran Rudolph J. (Rudy) Kunz, success boils down to this: You can’t preach from a truck. You can’t preach from an office—you have to be out there listening.

Kunz is the safety director at Three Phase Line Construction Inc., Rochester, N.H. He shared his journey within the profession and best practices to keep everyone safe.

Tell me about your career in the safety profession.

I’ve been in the safety profession for nearly 38 years, not including time in the Navy. Before that, I had earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and I actually started working on a master’s degree, but I knew that I was definitely headed down the wrong path.

I joined the Navy for four years as an assistant weapons officer on a ballistic missile submarine and with my chemistry background. When I got out I found a local job close to home in industrial hygiene. I did that for 2½ years, and then, in 1990, I was able to get a job at New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG), which brought me into the electric utility world.

I was there for 28½ years, and then six years ago, I took early retirement and came into the contractor world. I’ve been doing that now for more than six years.

What safety practices have been particularly effective?

Probably the biggest thing I would say is having a good job brief to start the job and making sure everybody is attentive. It’s not the piece of paper, but the conversation.

Communication throughout the task would probably eliminate 80% of the incidents that occur. Also, workers need to look outside their three-foot world and actually look around them to see what their fellow crew members are doing as “qualified safety observers.” Someone physically watching another worker on certain tasks is one of the hardest things to enforce out there.

Is there a specific injury or almost-injury that changed how you thought about safety on the job?

When I was at NYSEG, there were five fatalities. Then in the outside world, I dealt with a helicopter crash about six years ago that resulted in a double fatality. That certainly impacted what I thought about safety.

But the one incident that probably most impacted me was a severe arc flash injury. Just doing the investigation and then looking at all the causal factors that fed into that injury, I think that one actually had the most effect on what I like to look for and how I think we can improve safety.

What challenges do you face in managing safety responsibilities?

I think the hardest thing for safety professionals is to have the right words to make the right impact on employees. You have to earn their respect, and you can’t always be their friend. If I’m investigating an incident, I want to find out what drove the behavior—­usually the direct cause, and what factors there were under the company’s control that can be improved.

Usually it’s easy to see if a mistake was made, but that’s just the start of the investigation. We need to identify what drove the mistake so we can fix the underlying issue.

How do you encourage crews to take safety seriously?

For any safety professional, you have to be in their environment. You can’t preach from a truck. You can’t preach from an office. You have to be out there listening in their environment; that’s where you earn a better relationship and better chance that you’re going to hear what you need to hear in an investigation.

Every time there’s an incident, somebody wants to just add another layer of protection, and that just dilutes the other layers that are already there. I think we need to find and fix what’s broken. The crews have the answers. You have to understand the challenges of the job and try to reduce the white noise around safety.

Do you have any other advice for safety professionals?

Quite a few people are coming into the profession with a college degree, specifically in safety. But in this industry, you also get a lot of lineworkers rolling over into the job, so they’re not going to have the schooling, and they need to learn safety. Sometimes it’s hard to communicate that “safety” isn’t just sitting in a truck watching crews work.

Either way, you’ve got to be out observing the work. You have to be curious. Ask a lot of questions. Most workers love to explain what they do, so it’s good to learn what you can and how they’re performing the work. Maybe not get into the details of the task, but understand the safety components of the task.

The more you do that, especially early in your career, the more that’s going to help you move forward in that career.

Rudolph J. Kunz