What’s the secret to cutting through EHS administrative overload while improving workplace safety? With over 26 years of experience in safety management across industries like construction, manufacturing, and service, Terry Evans, Wood Products Division Safety Manager at Boise Cascade, knows the answer. In this insightful Q&A, Terry pulls back the curtain on how Intenseye became a game-changer for their safety program. From reducing time spent on data collection to turning raw observations into meaningful action, Terry shares how his deep expertise and Intenseye’s solutions help Boise Cascade focus on what matters most: keeping their teams safe. Dive into our Q&A to learn how they’re tackling safety challenges head-on and setting a new industry standard in workplace safety for the building materials industry.
What are your top priorities at Boise Cascade?
Terry: My top priorities at Boise Cascade are ensuring that our safety teams and leadership have all the tools they need to keep our employees safe at work. We manufacture a variety of wood products, and the manufacturing process involves a wide range of exposures. It’s too much for one person to manage alone. Creating tools that each facility can customize to meet their specific needs is a significant part of my role. Following that, mentoring upcoming EHS professionals and assisting with any gaps in resources at the mills are also key priorities.
How do you think technology is affecting the EHS space?
Terry: Technology has made a significant impact on the safety space. One of the challenges in safety is that it’s behavior-based, making it difficult to gather the same type of inputs you would from a manufacturing process or machinery. This requires a substantial amount of administrative resources to collect, collate, and analyze data.
The introduction of technology has greatly reduced the administrative burden by automating the process of collecting inputs—from hazard identifications to near misses—and performing trending automatically. With AI, we’re seeing numerous advantages in collecting data we may not have otherwise had.
For example, Intenseye has been a valuable partner because collecting behavioral data is limited. It takes a person to observe, report accurately, and then collate the data for informed decision-making. With the use of AI like Intenseye, we can get the information we need about the behaviors that are going unreported, and help the individuals with coaching events, but then also give us better insight into the data that allows us to see the true trends, that allows us to give the difference between work as imagined and work as done.
Terry, can you tell us more about how Intenseye fits into your key tech stack and existing workflows?
Terry: Our workflow at our pilot program in the Alexandria facility allows our leadership and safety personnel to assess areas where we might not always have an observer and evaluate the results of behavior change from the training programs we’ve implemented. We have seen positive results in several focus areas.
One key example is about fall protection. With hundreds of instances of stairs and catwalks traversed throughout shifts, maintaining three points of contact is crucial to mitigating hazards. While we conduct training on this, AI-powered observations reveal instances where the behavior isn’t consistently followed. This allows us to coach our employees effectively.
When addressing these issues, we ensure no individual is called out in front of the group. Instead, we focus on trends and implement additional control measures to increase compliance with the safest behaviors.
Also I could say, one of the things that surprised me about being an Intenseye customer was just the ease of the user interface. AI in general can be overwhelming and intimidating for those who don’t work with it every day. What really stood out in this experience was how quickly we were able to collaborate with our team and Intenseye to customize the system to meet our needs.
What challenges do EHS leaders face in managing data?
Terry: The challenges in managing safety data stem from its manual collection. This often involves using a card or paper to document hazard observations, which then needs to be manually processed and input into a system. This process requires significant resources and multiple steps by human hands to ensure accuracy.
When I started my safety career, I was manually analyzing data in Lotus 123, identifying opportunities to improve safety. The automation of data collection and analytics is essential for anyone in the safety field. Safety information is time-sensitive and perishable, requiring swift communication to prevent incidents. The longer the lag between data collection and action, the greater the exposure and the less effective the safety measures become.
Minimizing the administrative burden and turning data into actionable insights remain major challenges in the safety tech space. The types of safety data generally fall into two categories: leading indicators and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators, like incident rates, show past outcomes, while leading indicators, such as near misses, provide insight into workforce behavior. For example, near miss reporting is crucial, especially in manufacturing environments with manual material handling, where soreness reporting helps identify potential injuries early.
Ultimately, safety is about behavioral change, which is based on relationships built through face-to-face interactions. We track these interactions as a significant leading safety indicator, reflecting the health of our safety program.
How are you operationalizing safety data that you are getting from Intenseye?
Terry: The way we’re operationalizing the data we get from Intenseye and our other tech streams is by collecting observations of what’s actually happening on the floor. We then take those observations back to our leadership to say, “Okay, we thought these things were happening in this particular department, but now that we’ve observed it, we know this is exactly what’s going on.”
Sometimes our assumptions align with the reality, but other times, what we thought was happening turns out to be different under direct observation. One of the best ways we’re operationalizing this data is by ensuring we have an accurate measure of what’s happening on the floor, rather than relying on forecasts from lagging indicators or limited leading indicators. Direct observation has really enhanced our ability to turn data into actionable information.
What do you say to EHS leaders who may be hesitant about adopting technology in their EHS programs?
Terry: EHS people might be concerned about the tech space. Traditionally, EHS personnel have had a difficulty adopting a nonhuman intervention to safety because, again, that is what's been the driver of our profession for a very long time. There is no reason for us not to, as a profession, embrace what they can do with technology that we have been struggling to do with our human system so far.
But you will never be as good with what you've had previously than what you can be now with the advantages that tech will give us. It gives you better speed into, uh, data analytics. It gives you better insight into what's happening, and it's something that will help your people be safer if you embrace it properly.
How does Intenseye Chief help improve data analysis and support safety professionals?
Terry: I think when we start asking ourselves how our training efforts or exposure reduction efforts are actually showing up on the work floor, Intenseye Chief allows us to immediately analyze that data in real time. This helps us adjust our approach as needed or decide if we need to refocus on a different area.
Chief is especially valuable as we emphasize more on leading indicators, which require time-sensitive observations and analysis. By recording these observations and correlating them with audits already loaded on the platform, Chief makes it much easier to access and analyze real-time data on a day-to-day basis.
Using Chief also challenges us to ask better questions and look at data in new ways, much like a "cold eyes" review. This approach often provides insights that traditional methods might miss.
