Leading and Learning Through Safety

Do you want to engage your culture? Safety is the first step to creating the motivation needed for people to perform their best. Each day, we have the chance to lead our teams and learn more about our people through an understanding of our safety climate. Through looking at current issues in HSE, we chat about creating cultural value through safety. Your host is Dr. Mark French, CSP, SPHR aka The Safety Dude.

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Leading and Learning Through Safety

Episode 169 - 2025 Predictions

January 17, 2025 • Dr. Mark A French

The episode discusses anticipated trends in 2025 across leadership, HR, safety, and psychology. Key points include:

Shift in Hiring Practices: A move from valuing degrees to prioritizing skills, with organizations increasingly using AI to screen candidates. While this improves efficiency, concerns are raised about the loss of human judgment in hiring decisions.
Skill Development: The importance of evolving skills in the workplace and integrating training into employee development strategies.
AI in Talent Strategy and Safety: Widespread use of AI for developing job descriptions, customizing screenings, and summarizing workplace discussions. AI's role in creating safer and more efficient workplaces is emphasized, alongside ethical considerations like privacy.
Psychological Applications of Technology: Innovations like transcription tools in clinical psychology highlight the potential and challenges of balancing technological benefits with privacy concerns.

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This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're going to continue our first of the year discussions on what can we expect from 2025 what's coming our way? Or at least, what do the experts feel like are coming our way this week on the podcast, you Mark, welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people, safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hi, I'm Mark, and I'm so happy that you've joined me this year as we've kicked off two podcasts so far. Number two for the year, we're talking about trends that closed out 2024, and what are the experts predicting? What are the main organizations in leadership, HR, safety, psychology. What are they predicting that we have in store for us for 2025 and I think there's some interesting ideas coming out that we should be aware of and be ready for. And I want to talk a little bit about that on this episode. So this week, focusing on an article came out from the Society of Human Resource Management, or Sherm, as it's known, and they talk about, what are the seven trends? So this is an article that came out in January, the seven trends that will shape HR in 2025 and of course, I can't ignore the people impact of where that's going to be in safety. And there's some overlap even so last week, we talked about the 2024, top 10 OSHA citations. No real, huge surprises there. But we also blended that into what emerging trends does the American Psychological Association feel like is coming in 2025 once again, there's some blending. We we have some commonality that is going to be potentially part of what we're going to encounter in 2025 and I know we really don't know what's in store for for what this year is going to bring us. But let's talk about some of those things. The first one that I think is really important from Sherm, that they talked about, is that we're starting to see a shift from companies looking for degrees, but looking for skills, and this has always been in the leadership realm. One of the weirdest things that I've encountered with hiring and in safety, in human resources, in just overall business and leadership is degrees versus skills, versus all of that in between, am I biased? Maybe. And I'm going to go ahead and say that, because I understand that my own personal bias is going to get in the way, but also my life circumstances kind of put me in the situation that makes me feel like that was important. And so when I received my bachelor's degree, it took me a little bit longer than the average to get that. And a lot of life, you know, life, life. So got in the way of that, got it jumped out. Tried to find work, tough to find work, even back then, getting in at the somewhere, to get started, started building skills like certificates and just experience showing that the a lot of safety and HR credentials require not only a baseline education, but also years of work. You have to show years of work for like your certified safety professional, your peer. Term Sep, or your human resource Certification Institute, SPHR, PHR, those things you have to have knowledge from a degree and skills of showing life work and work in the field before you can sit for those. And so I see that there is a blend. And so many organizations, unfortunately, want a silver bullet approach. They want the One Stop easy. So let's use this impressive screening tool to look for the degree we're looking for, or keywords of skills that we're looking for. And yeah, optim, it's a real if, if you're shocked by this, say, I'm teaching you something new. It's a and we'll get into this artificial intelligence, but using screening tools that search a LinkedIn profile or search a resume to look for the keywords, do a match and then determine if the candidates a good match based on the skills, background and whatever job has been set forth. It supposedly is a first line screening, but I truly feel that it's becoming more and more of the final like that's how companies are. Are reducing the need for good recruiting and good human resource staff in hopes that the computer will give them the right candidate, rather than relying on human intuition and good sensibility of how it fits, we're relying on algorithms personal opinion there. But I feel like it's more true than it should be, that it became an easy out for organizations and companies to reduce having to worry about finding good candidates, and just let the computer do it, because if it doesn't work, we'll just find someone else, the disposable employee, which is, again, I can't really Fathom and don't understand and really don't appreciate, because it just is. It feels inhuman, and I don't think that's the way it should be. When we look at skills over degrees now, and they're saying this is becoming more important. Yeah, people want something with some experience, but then they also want it for a bargain, and which also is unbelievable, when you look at the market and you hear, Oh, yeah, we want 10 years of experience, but it's going to be like entry level pay. Can't do that, and with this increase of looking for skills versus just a degree, now it's not saying not a degree, or it's not saying not have some knowledge in the background of what you need. So when it comes to skill, let's say, Do you have the background to be even in the skilled trades. Did you learn under someone? Did you get the baseline knowledge to be able to do your work effectively? Then let's look at the skills you developed inside there, problem solving, ability to work independently, whatever it is that's needed for those skills. But supposedly, this is becoming a stronger and stronger trend, but I don't think it really has never not been a trend. And then the second one is evolving skills and thriving workforces. So why don't we teach more skills in the workplace? Yeah, I agree. That's part of employee development. Early in my career, I remember thinking, Man, this is silly. Why am I having to sit down and learn this problem solving method and this Lean method, and why am I learning about mooda? Why am I learning about the seven Why am I doing these things later in my career, I go, I'm glad they did that. It really helped to have that baseline knowledge. And even though they didn't I think my criticism was it was never used appropriately. But I'm a cynic, so that's normal for me to be a cynic, looking at how we develop our team, and they need it, and they are wanting it more and more, because those skills are becoming more and more important as part of number one, back to skills. The other one that really stands out, that I want to talk a little bit more, and I just alluded to it, but I want to continue it that discussion a little bit more is AI is impact on talent strategy and how to how it's being used, how frequently it's being used. But what's interesting is the American Psychological Association also says that technology is reshaping the practice of psychology, and that also, how are we adapting to artificial intelligence impacting the field of psychology? And those two are linked. Industrial and organizational psychology is a factor that comes into these people management, people analytics, talent strategy, motivation theory. There's a lot of. Overlap there. Let's continue that deep dive of a discussion on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. You are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French dsda Consulting learn you lead others. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict, management and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So what is AI's impact? And this is a trend that's taught being talked about in safety, HR, psychological, we're all of this is tying into what can be the use of artificial intelligence in our everyday practices. And it can absolutely, like any good technology tool, it can be used. Well, it can be abused. It can be underused. All within that spectrum it, it is all part of it, and some of the stats that Sherm sites is, nearly two thirds of companies are using AI right now to develop their job descriptions. 42% use it to customize job screenings and job postings. Two thirds use it to screen applicants, communicate with applicants or automate candidate searches, which means that these web optimized or search engine optimized resumes and LinkedIn areas are important. It's becoming more important that, and there's specialty services out there that would optimize a resume or optimize LinkedIn or optimize your web page, so that these AI tools are going out there and finding it. They used to be search engine optimized. Now it's aI optimized, making sure you hit where you want to hit when there's job, these AI tools are going out and looking for areas now this is not bad. This can help a lot when you take the time to manage it appropriately in isn't the first half. My biggest concern is that it takes away from the human element of what hiring should be, that they should be joining an organization of people. And if you don't care enough upfront to actually look at the people and communicate with your people, I mean, are you really going to care about it when you enter the work? That's a chicken and egg conversation. I guess the companies that care about people probably wouldn't do that. Those who do it probably don't care and really want it to be more automated and less HR and less people, touches and things. It's a deeper discussion of true like, what is the culture and what is building into the culture of the organization? Like, what are the important values of that company and organization and how it makes up of the people and how that works. Now we switching over to looking at how that's affecting even in some safety realm, using AI to help write policy, help develop, even do searches, and I've been playing with this personally, is trying to optimize, like, teach a AI, and I'm terrible at it. I'll be honest, not I am playing. And I'll put it that playing is a very liberal term there with what I'm doing with with AI, but teaching it to go into the OSHA citations. Look up citations, look up the law, look up interpretations, letter of interpretations, and try to find the best answer for a moderately complex question about safety, because it's always been some of the, some of the opportunity with searching the regulations is the field of knowledge for safety is so broad and having to know like, not Only was the law say, well, when it was incorporated, what was the intent? And then are there letters of interpretation? Have there been citations based on that that may be able to say, well, it went through once, it'll be another fine for someone else down the road and asking him a question, for it to pull up and go, Okay, well, here's your risk, and here's why it's not good so far. But I can see the potential, but I see that AI is not going away, and I know that's a very oversimplified way of saying that it's not going away because it's here. And. It's intimidating, because it can do a really amazing items, and especially when in the world of psychology, they're talking about the wearable devices that privacy one patient privacy in a clinical setting, of using the the recorders that do transcription and review to be able to summarize notes, summarize conversations, summarize takeaways. Some of those are very powerful tools. Privacy aside, there probably needs to be some stronger privacy controls in that realm, but they're saying in clinical settings, AI can be a very, very powerful tool to help with that. And I'll give an example of where I tested, not clinical, but tested in the in more of my realm of industrial and organizational. I dug up all of my old transcripts from where I wrote my dissertation. So it was hours of transcripts of people I interviewed and asked questions of and I had them transcribed, and back at that time, I went through each and every one highlighted, found that the trends seem to fit Answer Michael, etc, etc. I dumped all of those transcripts into like chat, G, P, t4, and then I asked it my basic questions I was trying to answer in my dissertation. And I was shocked, did it get it exactly to where I was at in my analysis? No, but was it 80% Oh, yeah, it was. It did make some of the lateral moves that I did looking at the data of motivation and learning and kind of the stressors that come in as being someone who has to train safety in trying to motivate a whole spectrum of people in a very short amount of time in a very legalistic way, because we have to teach the law in some cases, like, how do you do that for all these different people with all these different motivations? How do you find the best practice to do that, and how do you create that motivation? It was close. It was it was not something that I expected it to be that close on but it was pretty, pretty good. And so I can see that, let's say you are in a series of meetings about an issue, and you have everyone's consent to record it, transcribe it with some of this, the the AI technology, it's there, and then you filter it in and ask it the key question of, how did we land? What was the key theme of this longer meeting, or this longer discussion? If you summarize where we're at, you're gonna get close. You're gonna get within the ballpark of really understanding what needs to be done next, or what was the key theme. And I can think of multi day brainstorming sessions that I've had in my career with different organizations where they pull in a whole bunch of people, and you have like, half a day, or even a day or two day kaizen event or brainstorming event, and all this data is being captured, all these words are being said, and imagine not having to have them all over the place on post it notes, or writing scratchy notes or but basically letting everybody talk freely and have it go into a recording device, dump it into An AI system and go, what were the main improvements that we felt like couldn't come and get your top five and go, All right, here's some stuff to work on that that is a little bit of a game changer when you think about that potential. So 2025, I think we're gonna see more emergence of AI. But on top of that, looking at interestingly, how do we develop the skills of our people at the same time, levering, leveraging that technology, and how does it make our workplace physically and psychologically safer? Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Again, looking forward to 2025 looking forward to more podcasts with you, and until next time we chat, stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. You. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.