Environment, health and safety

there.

Hi, my name is Vivianne Boaz and welcome back to another episode of the EHS Unplugged podcast.

Today, we're joined by a guest who is no stranger to the pod, but I'm going to let him introduce himself regardless.

Karibu sana.

Hi, my name is Samuel Kiragu Njuguna, founder and CEO of Safety Watch Innovations Limited.

Glad to be back here at the EHS Unplugged podcast.

With regards to Safety Watch Innovations Limited, We are a company that deals with helping businesses and companies in Kenya and across Africa in building capacity with regards to occupational health and safety.

We have four tiers in our company, which deals with compliance.

I'm your host, Jay Culbert.

Today's guest brings more than a decade of experience in environmental health and safety, helping organizations across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and industrial sectors create safer, more sustainable workplaces.

Throughout her career, she's worked across nearly every level of EH&S, from hands-on environmental consulting and hazardous waste management to leading global environmental compliance, risk management, and sustainability initiatives.

She's held multiple leadership positions at Takeda, where she most recently served as global senior manager of environmental compliance and risk and global nature lead.

Her experience also includes environmental research with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she contributed to published scientific research.

Today, she serves as the Associate Director of Environmental Health and Safety at Moderna, overseeing EHS operations at the company's Norwood Manufacturing Facility.

Christy Boisenal, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jay.

which is making mental health protection a statutory requirement for employers.

So what does it mean for employers and employees now that psychosocial risk assessment and management is actually an employer's legal duty under the Occupational Safety and Health Act? Why should companies invest in this and how should they go about it? Speaking to me today about this are Amalina Davis, Director of Consultancy and Training with ThriveWell, and Mohamad Zainal Abidin, Group QHSE and Sustainability Manager with Saudi NAPESCO, and that's for Quality, Health, Safety and Environment.

Amalina and Zainal, thank you so much for joining me today.

How are we? I'm

So we really look for that and try to teach that with our leaders.

I think second thing that he really advised me is to look, this is not just an EH&S responsibility.

You can't EH and S your way and to improve safety.

Certainly a competent EH&S function is critical because they help you know and understand the guardrails and define your strategy and build day-to-day work that's done on the floor.

But it really starts again back with the leaders need to live this.

And I think finally, what I've learned personally, aside from what my dad told me, is you got to be honest with yourself.

And so, you know, we're learning.

We are adapting and trying to drive our behaviors.

You're going to see it in the right corner.

scan that and this is a AI and EHS questionnaire that Hillary came up with and we're going to go over some of the survey respondents but I'm also going to just let you guys scan that code and sign up do it yourself so that we could get some more just the industry in a whole, we need to work together on this thing, right? We gotta get ahead of this before any of the AI stuff that is not good starts getting more predominant.

So I'd rather us work on it ourselves.

Here's the opportunity, scan that QR code, and we're gonna go ahead and talk us through what the respondents did.

Why don't I just put together a quick, a quick survey and send it to everybody? And lo and behold, I got an initial group of 50 people that just were very generous with their time and energy.

And they filled out a survey just about what they thought about AI, what they used AI for, where they saw it going, where they wanted it to go.

And they gave me some information about their demographics to what part of EHS they worked in.

And it's just been really rewarding to use their content and to just learn more about how we as EHS professionals are being impacted by AI.

can argue it's important, but I would say it is pretty distinct to say your environmental program has different components and is just fundamentally pretty different than social governance.

Kind of think the same thing about EHS.

Frankly, it gets lumped in together, but health and safety I'm absolutely critical, but as a problem, you're really oriented on people, people's behaviors, the environments that they're in, unsafe practices, getting ahead of these risks.

Environmental is much more of a big data problem, like something we have seen actually, and it gets to the start of the show, we were talking about spreadsheets.

So that's kind of interesting because, you know, if you're thinking about SIFT prevention, very critical but you're you're thinking about how do we make sure that people have the right training make sure that the right tailgate meetings are done make sure everybody knows lockout tag out procedures just all the safety procedures absolutely critical very different than thinking i have an automated building that has data loggers pulling all my air emissions but i need to understand exactly what's being emitted when am i adhering to my limits That's kind of regardless of how you train anyone.

You just need to be able to understand what information do we need to be measuring, processing, mapping it to the rules that we're bound to.

What's the reporting requirement based on that? How do we need to aggregate this data? So, yeah, in general, one of the things that we've really focused on is we want to be the E in EHS and the E in ESG and saying that health, safety, social governance, all of these are also important.

But the environmental component is, if you think about the Venn diagram, it's the one overlapping component of that.

My job is to get us started, keep an eye on the chat and make sure you all get the most out of the next hour.

Now, today's session is part of the MIOSH Academy, our open learning initiative for HSEQ professionals.

We run regular webinars, publish resources, and bring in some of the best thinkers in the industry, all to help you create safer and smarter work environments.

Now, a quick question for you all to sit with.