Keynote / Opening Session - Lisa Ryan, CSP

Engaged by Design: Why Workplace Safety Breaks Down Before the Incident Report Does   

Safety culture isn't failing in plants and worksites because people have stopped caring. It's failing because the conversations that used to catch small problems early have quietly disappeared. Production pressure never lets up, experienced workers keep walking out the door for the last time, and the workforce keeps shifting under everyone's feet. On paper, everything still looks fine. The trainings are documented, the checklists get signed, and the audits pass. Underneath that, something harder to measure is quietly going missing: the trust, the willingness to speak up, the feeling that someone notices when a person raises a hand before something gets someone hurt. 

In this keynote, Lisa Ryan pushes safety and operations leaders to stop treating engagement as a soft skill on the side and to start building it into the systems that protect people every day, using her Six Gears of Grategy® framework as the blueprint. 

"You can mandate a checklist. You can't mandate trust." 

PROGRAM OVERVIEW: 

This program delivers practical strategies and real-world insight to strengthen safety culture across occupational safety and health environments. Built for workplaces under constant production pressure, it helps leaders protect the human judgment that keeps people safe when systems and checklists can't catch everything. Through interactive discussion and real-world examples, participants will tackle challenges such as the erosion of judgment, the retirement of tribal knowledge, and AI deployments that move faster than safety can keep up with. The goal is to create a culture where frontline workers feel valued, speak up when something isn't right, and trust that their instincts still matter, leading to safer floors, stronger teams, and lasting results.

What Your Members Will Learn:

• A framework for spotting judgment erosion early: the five quiet signals that show up long before an incident report does. 
• Language to push back on AI deployments that skip safety, so safety directors stop inheriting risk they had no say in. 
• A plan for protecting tribal knowledge on the way out the door, as Boomers and Gen X retire and take decades of sensory expertise with them. 
• A recognition practice that keeps frontline people reporting, because the moment workers stop flagging concerns, your leading indicators go dark.
• Key Insight: Automation handles what the system was trained to see; your people handle everything else. When you stop protecting that, you stop protecting your floor.

Occupational Noise Exposure Assessment: OSHA Compliance and Beyond 

This presentation will help senior EHS professionals advance occupational-noise programs beyond minimum OSHA compliance. It covers exposure criteria, measurement and dosimetry strategies, interpretation of real-world results, and hierarchy-based controls—including “Buy Quiet” and ototoxicant management.

Learning Objectives: 

What will the audience gain: 

• Be able to differentiate OSHA, NIOSH, and ACGIH exposure criteria and explain how exchange rates affect calculated dose; 
• Know how to develop an integrated assessment strategy using sound-level measurements, octave-band analysis, and personal dosimetry; and 
• Understand how to Interpret exposure results and select effective engineering, administrative, and hearing-protection controls.

Fall Protection Program Management: Simplifying a Complicated Standard

Fall protection remains one of OSHA’s most frequently cited violations year after year, yet managing a fall protection program does not have to be complicated. This session breaks the problem down into parts a safety professional can actually act on.

We begin with why falls stay at the top of the citation list and what that pattern reveals about how programs typically fail. From there we walk the hierarchy of controls as it applies specifically to work at height, simplifying the mitigation options available to you — elimination and passive protection first, then fall restraint, then fall arrest — so that personal protective equipment is understood as the last line of defense rather than the default answer.

The session then covers the program management best practices set out in the ANSI Z359 code and translates them into fundamental program elements: key terminology that is routinely misused, criteria for selecting the right PPE for the task and the anchorage available, inspection requirements that keep a system ready to perform its one-time-only job, and proper harness donning and fit.

Fall protection is unlike any other category of PPE in one critical respect: it must physically connect to a suitable anchorage, which makes engineering of the complete system — anchorage, connectors, body support, and clearance — essential rather than optional. Human factors, from comfort to training to supervision, determine whether that engineered system is actually used correctly.

Attendees will take part in hands-on product demonstrations and will have the opportunity to practice proper harness donning during the session. Questions are encouraged throughout the presentation, with dedicated time reserved at the end for open discussion of attendees’ own site conditions and program challenges.

Learning Objectives: 

Attendees will be able to:

• Explain why fall protection is repeatedly the top-cited hazard by OSHA, and identify the program gaps that drive those citations.
• Apply the hierarchy of controls to work-at-height hazards to select the appropriate level of mitigation rather than defaulting to personal fall arrest.
• Recognize what makes fall protection different from other PPE — the requirement to connect to a suitable anchorage — and evaluate anchorage adequacy accordingly.
• Describe how human factors influence the real-world effectiveness of a fall protection system, and account for them in program design and training.
• Use ANSI Z359 program management best practices to build or audit the core elements of a written fall protection program.
• Perform and evaluate proper harness donning and fit, and carry out a compliant pre-use equipment inspection.

Workplace Safety Essentials for the Safety Professional: OSHA Fundamentals, EnforcementTrends, and the Rise of AI 

Jamie will explore the function and framework of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, along with its state plan counterparts, and highlight the critical elements of the agency's current regulatory and enforcement policies. Specifically, he will dive into OSHA's General Duty Clause and  explain how the agency has increasingly been leveraging this age old provision to enforce workplace safety hazards in the absence of regulatory action on various standards.

Jamie will also provide a general regulatory (and de-regulatory) update on the agency and discuss its current unified regulatory agenda, with a focus on how it might impact the safety professional's day to day priorities. 

Jamie will then take the audience on a tour through a typical OSHA inspection and provide some best practices on what to do -- and what not to do -- when OSHA comes knocking at your workplace.

Finally, Jamie will provide an update on how the evolution of AI continues to impact workplace safety.

Learning Objectives

What will the audience gain:

• The audience will gain an introduction to OSHA's general principles with a focus on OSHA's use of its General Duty Clause to fill the vacuum left by federal deregulation efforts.
• The audience will receive an update on the regulation and use of AI in the workplace safety context.
• The audience will understand the best practices for navigating an OSHA inspection.
• We will cover key areas of anticipated OSHA enforcement against a backdrop of deregulation.

Safety is a Journey Not a Destination 

Safety isn’t a one-time goal—it’s a continuous journey. It is a practical, 

no-nonsense effort of building a culture where safety becomes second nature—not just rules to follow. In a world where incidents often happen due to small, overlooked actions, this presentation focuses on the human side of safety—the decisions, habits, and behaviors that truly make a difference.

Perfect for supervisors, managers and safety professionals who want results - not just policies.  Because real safety isn't about reaching a destination - it's about improving every single day 

Learning Objectives:

What will the audience gain:

• Create a workplace where safety is owned by everyone.
• Strengthen safety performance using simple, proven fundamentals.
• Improve understanding of the cultural influences on work performance.
• Review the East Palestine Derailment as a Case Study.

Using OSHA/BLS Datasets for Hazard Identification 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) collects and maintains data on its inspections and citations, injury and illness data electronically submitted to OSHA, work-related severe injury and fatality data, and chemical exposure health data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects and maintains data on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses. Much of the data is organized by industry NAICS codes. The data can be used to identify common hazards and outcomes. Learning how to access the data can be a useful tool in an effective safety and health program.

Learning Objectives:

• Finding and using the web sites of OSHA and BLS to identify potential workplace hazards.