“My goal at Cority is to make product changes that are going to have the biggest impact for most people running the environmental, health, and safety divisions.” – Sasha Finley, Product Manager at Cority.
Recently, Cority’s resident ergonomist and product marketing manager, Kim Moull, sat down with Sasha Finley, a fellow Cority occupational health and safety veteran, to talk about her 25+ years of background and experience in the EHS industry. She shares the challenges she sees in today’s health and safety field, her predictions for its future, and how she is shaping workplace safety products.
Kim Moull: You have an extensive background working in EHS (Environmental, Health, and Safety). Can you tell me a bit about your background and what initially drew you to a career in the field?
Sasha Finley: Absolutely. I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Environmental Science from Western University, a path parked by an inspiring environmental studies professor. To deepen my expertise, I obtained a Health and Safety certification from Fanshawe College, where I also earned a Human Resources certificate. My dedication to professional growth and the EHS profession led me to achieve the Canadian Registered Safety Professional (CRSP) designation, which I continue to maintain.
In 1998, at Gates Rubber Company, I started a co-op position that reported to an EHS leader. Following that role, I joined General Motors as a Hazardous Materials Coordinator.
When General Motors sold its defense division to General Dynamics Land Systems – Canada in the early 2000s, I transitioned to their Facilities Engineering department as an Environmental Officer. Over the years, my role evolved and in 2006, I was appointed the EHS Area Manager for Canada. In 2019, I took on a new challenge at BWXT, a nuclear technology firm, for a brief period.
Later that year, Cority approached me with an opportunity to join their team of in-house industry experts as an implementation consultant— the role aligned with my passion for EHS and allowed me to work from home, and also be present for my teenage children and family in their crucial years, so I embraced it.
During my 12-year tenure at Western University as an Instructor, I had the privilege of mentoring the next generation of EHS professionals. There I taught the Environmental Management System course in the postgraduate Occupational Health and Safety program, led the design and delivery of course curricula for the Occupational Health and Safety Diploma Program. My experience allowed me to shape and inspire future leaders in the field, equipping them to excel in their careers.
Kim Moull: What’s involved with your role as a Product Manager at Cority? How does your previous experience in EHS influence your approach to product management?
Sasha Finley: Interestingly, I started in our implementation department, where I worked for two years to deploy Cority’s solutions for our customers. While I loved helping customers configure applications, I felt that my experience would be better used in influencing design of the product since I had spent many years as a user of EHS products.
In 2022, I made the switch to Product Manager and took on the design of Cority’s Permit to Work solution. While helping design the solution, I drew on my experience of managing the permit to work process first-hand in the field – part of that was remembering the administrative burden of the process and how that would take away from my team’s core EHS responsibility.
My goal at Cority is to make product changes that are going to have the biggest impact for most people running the environmental, health, and safety divisions. As a product manager, I believe it is one thing to design a product, and completely another to configure and practically use it. Which is why it is important in my role to listen to Cority’s clients’ pain points, to involve clients in building the functionality, and to take back their feedback on the mockups that we present.
Having walked in the shoes of our clients’ end users allows them to trust me and my 25+ years of EHS experience. It makes our working relationship much more synergistic and trustworthy. I can take their needs and wants and explain it to a technical product developer from an EHS perspective, so that they understand the importance of that functionality to an end user.
As a result, I get a lot of satisfaction from designing the solutions I would have used when I was an EHS professional and making the jobs of EHS teams easier. It is the best feeling ever… and sometimes makes me wish I were still working out in the field!
Kim Moull: What are some of the biggest challenges you see EHS teams facing today?
Sasha Finley: One of the big challenges EHS teams face is individual employees deferring the responsibility of health and safety to just the EHS teams. Instead, companies need to encourage employee engagement from across the whole organization, such as reporting potential hazards, to ensure that health and safety is part of the organization’s DNA.
If the organization does not embrace a safety culture from a top-down, proactive, and day to day standpoint, then health and safety programs will not be adopted successfully, no matter how well written.
Like personal trainers, EHS professionals can build tools and programs, but each employee must actively and personally participate in the adoption of safety culture to keep themselves and their coworkers safe every day at work.
Another big challenge EHS teams face is the expectation for them to analyze copious amounts of data, such as injury data or lost time data and then to determine trends, as data analysts would. Health and safety people are not traditionally trained to do that.
Specialized data analysis of EHS data would mean moving away from simple historic metrics, towards a deeper analysis that can tell the complete story of the organization’s health and safety. EHS professionals cannot be expected to be responsible for this deeper metric-analysis and so currently, they fall back on surface level metrics that can only tell a surface level story.
Lastly, mental health indicators, stress, violence and harassment, and other psychosocial safety hazards are becoming increasingly important, as is the role of accessibility in the workplace. This is straining the EHS teams’ threshold who now need to be generalists in all these areas and are responsible for more possible adverse incidents.
Kim Moull: How do you think technology can be leveraged to help organizations address these challenges?
Sasha Finley: Cority as a solution is truly amazing, where data analysis for core pillars of an organization, such as quality, environmental, health and safety, is meshed well. You cannot deliver quality, if your organization’s health and safety are in shambles, for example.
Cority’s technology captures segregated EHS metrics in an interconnected manner and helps our customers analyze the overall health of their organization easily. Coupled with that are the functionalities of real time information, flagging and actions, leading to an effective workflow.
Apart from providing Cority’s clients with the ability to analyze this segregated data in an easy, interconnected manner, the software also provides predictive analytics so that organizations can prevent incidents in the future. This incident forecasting allows EHS decision makers to budget and plan the health and safety program better.
Secondly, as EHS culture expands to the shop floor and more employees are expected to make risk assessments and take corrective action, artificial intelligence will become a vital starting point.
Organizations will leverage AI-driven predictive analysis with much larger, unstructured and sensor EHS data to identify complex correlations that might not have been obvious. EHS professionals can then act proactively rather than reactively, which means they are happier, and their workers are safer.
Kim Moull: Despite being able to help optimize EHS program management, are there any barriers that might prevent an organization from adopting new EHS technology/software?
Sasha Finley: I believe that EHS should be a partnership between the EHS professionals and the end users they are trying to keep safe. They must know that you are all on the same team when it comes to safety.
And this is where many organizations go wrong. They fail to involve end users in the initial decision making of software implementation. And it could simply be because when EHS teams are exploring software, they want to do it all, right now.
What happens is that the system becomes overly complicated for the end user to use, maintain and adopt – it ends in failure of early adoption. You must remember people on the floor such as mechanics, electricians, line workers and even supervisors, are not typical users of electronics, and this is a completely new system.
So, while choosing software and the number of solutions, organizations need to be aware of how user friendly it will be. My advice is to introduce solutions in a phased approach, gather feedback, so the end users feel part of the process. This way they are more likely to adopt additional functionality that is coming in the next phases.
It goes the same at Cority. As product managers, we want to involve our clients in the design of the platform. In turn, clients should involve their end users in these discussions. If we are all doing our part, we will end up with an amazing product because we have heard from everybody.
So now with Scott Miner joining Cority as Senior Director of UX/UI, we are focusing on the user experience of the great functionality of data collection that exists in Cority. We are zeroing in on how end users enter data, and how we can make that process as easy as possible for them.
Kim Moull: What advice would you give to companies that are considering investing in EHS software for the first time?
Sasha Finley: If it were me, I would be looking at key processes within my organization and introduce solutions gradually. For this reason, I would only consider software companies that offer a one-stop solution so that my organization can scale up. I would look to phase away from multiple different applications that collect EHS data in my organization.
A fundamental feature I would look for in EHS software is the capacity to consolidate key enterprise processes. Many key processes, such as audits, corrective actions, or management of change share components that are similar across environmental, health and safety workflows.
Using one software for inspections, one for audits, and one for inspections, leads to systems that do not talk to each other and the cost to own them disparately goes up. I am left with pulling metrics and reports from a bunch of different systems.
Additionally, I would set up an advisory team that would involve not just EHS professionals, but also frontline employees. To ensure the system will be adopted, I would implement pilot programs and incorporate my team’s feedback. Remember, it is not a sprint, it is a marathon.
What would not work is making a software selection on my own, have it configured, and then forcing my employees to use it. If you try to do that, you will get a push back.
EHS Technology and IT Consolidation: Where to Start, and What to Know
Kim Moull: How do you see EHS software evolving in the next five to ten years and what impact will it have on the workplace and employee well-being?
Sasha Finley: In the next 5-10 years, EHS software will grow rapidly to include employee well-being, mental health and wellness programs as important components of workplace safety, building that culture of safety we discussed earlier. Due to the scale and speed at which information can be disseminated, EHS teams can educate and train a lot more people, more quickly.
Another shift will be towards wearable devices such as smart helmets and watches, built in with the near me kind of functionality. Walking onto a worksite and being alerted of hazards, permit status, machinery health, contractors on site, are just some examples of the kind of information that can be available in real time on mobile devices.
For more high-risk activities, the way artificial intelligence is going to interplay with health and safety implementation in the workplace will be significant. Artificial intelligence will analyze historic data and patterns of unsafe behavior or conditions to predict potential risks and prevent accidents.
So, because end users are no longer going to be working from behind giant, stationary screens, and desktops, EHS software companies are starting to be cognizant about how software is developed and utilized.
Kim Moull: What emerging technologies do you see having the most impact on how EHS programs operate over the next few years?
Sasha Finlay: With AI and predictive analysis coming up in the industry (https://www.cority.com/blog/optimizing-ehs-with-ai/), organizations will want to harness it partly because it is the trend and where things are headed. But honestly, it does not matter how you do the root cause analysis or the risk assessment if you are doing it well.
What will change in a major way is data analysis, going beyond just historic metrics or a simplistic tally of audits and inspections. We will be able to take a more holistic approach to data and focus on how systems can improve. Hopefully, this will mean programs will grow from hedging bets on a few select metrics, to an overall checkup of not just health and safety, but organizational health.
With the availability of in-depth analytics, we’re witnessing a huge rise in the adoption of mobile and handheld IoT (Internet of Things) devices, including smartphones, and wearables like smartwatches and smart glasses. Given the rapid progress we’ve already achieved, like monitoring heart rate, sleep data, movement trends, and cardio health from our wrists—the potential applications of this technology are vast. I am particularly excited to see how these innovations will further transform the EHS and quality management landscape, driving more proactive, data-driven decision-making and enhancing overall workplace safety and efficiency.
