HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE PERCEPTIONS OF YOUR INDUSTRY FROM WORKERS, CONSUMERS, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC? AF: Public perception is huge these days. It is really important for us to consider the perception of the communities surrounding our facilities. We host a lot of town hall meetings with the community to let them know what we’re doing and also to give them a venue for raising concerns and asking questions. We are a factory—we’re making stuff, and any smell in the area is going to be blamed on us whether we are the actual source or not. Transparency is so important, but it can be incredibly hard to get people to believe you are actually being transparent. We even have EHS staff dedicated to community relations. Being a spokesperson doesn’t come naturally to most of us, but once our EHS staff are trained in risk communication, that’s a huge benefit over a PR spokesperson who doesn’t have a scientific background. We may also bring in a third party to perform a risk assessment, which can lend a lot of credibility to the results.  We pay attention to consumer perceptions because our image is very important to selling our product. We are very sensitive to how the consumer sees us. You can’t hide things, because everything comes out eventually, and it will ultimately impact who we can do business with as well as who will buy our product.  When it comes to workers’ perceptions, the most important thing I’ve learned is that personal interactions are key, both for you to understand their problems and for them to see that you are actually listening and trying to help. Taking a little extra time to meet face-to-face can save a whole lot of trouble and misunderstanding.  ML: You need to be cognizant of employee, organization, and media perceptions. I try to tailor risk communication to the specific audience. After a risk assessment, I may communicate my findings to employees, repackage those results for the media, and then package them in a different way for senior leadership. Now more than ever, I’m putting myself in the shoes of stakeholders who are interpreting risk in their environment. When I explain a safety risk, I think about how I can inspire a positive reaction rather than have that same information lead to a negative one. I focus on how the risk will be understood, interpreted, and ultimately acted on by that employee or organization. For risk communication, I am more proactive than reactive. You want to share both inside and outside the organization as often as you can to show that you’re doing something. Then if something negative occurs, it’s clear that it was a one-off rather than a springboard for further media scrutiny.  In the tech sector, we need to be cognizant of not just mitigating risk but communicating both the negatives and the positives to the media. There is so much scrutiny and attention on the tech industry—it’s really under a microscope. As a risk manager, I need to make sure I’ve done everything I can to mitigate risk, build that mentality into our company culture, and then help my organization tell a compelling story to the board of directors or media about what we’re doing. BC: The question of how you develop trust within your workforce is a really interesting one. There’s a fine line between communicating regularly to your workers and overdoing it. There’s nothing wrong with too much information, but today, the average worker is bombarded with all kinds of messaging from human resources, managers and supervisors, support functions, family members, and advertisers. How to develop impactful, concise messaging is something we are constantly looking at. Communication is different today than it was five to 10 years ago, and it will continue to change. One of the issues in the factory setting is dealing with turnover in the workforce. For example, we may have just delivered certain messages to the workforce, and then we’ll need to deal with attrition and how to be effective with a set of new employees. New employees may be less motivated regarding safety and well-being than long-tenured employees. We operate a business-to-business company, so we don’t target our messaging directly to consumers; our customers are mostly other businesses. We certainly face issues of how our industry as a whole is perceived, and some scrutiny falls on the manufacturing end of our business. We focus on understanding our risk and managing it so that, if we are put to the test, we’ll be able to demonstrate that we’re handling things responsibly.