George Gritziotis charged with developing a provincial health and safety strategy for Ontario
George Gritziotis will be the first to take on the role of Ontario’s chief prevention officer, a job created following a review of the province’s occupational health and safety prevention and enforcement system led by University of Toronto professor Tony Dean.
Gritziotis, a founding executive director of the Construction Sector Council, will be responsible for developing a provincial occupational health and safety strategy, co-ordinating and aligning Ontario’s workplace health and safety prevention system and providing advice on the prevention of workplace injuries and occupational diseases, according to the province.
Canadian Safety Reporter spoke to Gritziotis in September before he officially started in his newly-created position.
CSR: Why did you take the job?
Gritziotis: Looking at my background working in the construction industry, safety and prevention is top of mind. And when this opportunity came around, it allows me to take a lot of what I’ve learned and a lot of the things I’m passionate about within construction, which is to ensure that anybody who goes to work is going to go back home.
In many ways, working in construction, because it’s top of mind, it’s something that’s embedded in everything we do.
This allows me to work in a bigger cross-sectoral environment and to continue to push for the importance of a health and safety workplace environment for everybody.
CSR: What are your priorities?
Gritziotis: Just at a high level when it comes to health and safety, as far as I’m concerned, everything’s a priority and everything should be about zero tolerance.
That benchmark is very easy for me and that’s something we should always strive for — zero tolerance when you’re looking at issues around injuries or fatalities.
But in the first few weeks I’ll be spending time with the prevention council and I’ll be meeting with many of the health and safety partners and a lot of the stakeholders.
Essentially I’m going to be meeting with the prevention community across Ontario and I’ll be focusing a lot on the expert panel’s recommendations, the Tony Dean report and looking at many of the key recommendations in there.
A lot of them are what I would consider sort of strategic, related to aligning the prevention activities across Ontario and some are a bit more grassroots, when we’re looking at developing mandatory basic awareness training.
CSR: Why do you think zero tolerance is important?
Gritziotis: Because if that’s the benchmark, we’ll always be working towards it. Always. This is too big an issue to consider anything less and it’s too important an issue… it transcends our personal lives and our professional lives.
CSR: What are the challenges of taking on a new position like this one?
Gritziotis: Well, it’s building the relationships and bringing a diverse stakeholder group together.
When I talk about the prevention community or prevention stakeholders, it’s not just the people that deliver the programs, it’s also the recipients of these programs.
So I think one of the big — you referred to challenges, I am going to say opportunities — one of the big opportunities is to bring all of these players together to work together and to come up with a consensus approach, solutions that we all buy into together.
Ultimately when you have the developers in the same room with the people that are the recipients of the program, if everybody has ownership of the final solution, the chances of buy-in and the chances of using them are a lot greater than working in isolation of each other.
Overall, the thing I want to do and the opportunity I think exists here is getting a lot of committed and passionate people in the same room, working together.
CSR: When you get those people in a room together is there anything specific you’ll want to talk about first, based on the Dean report or just in general?
Gritziotis: Well the Dean report will be a big part.
I have the luxury or the benefit of the Dean report that brought all of those players together in some way.
If you look at the issues that were identified in the Dean report it came from the prevention community.
We want to hear from them and we want them to help play a role in putting it together.
I think the Dean report did a good job of identifying the issues and what some of those priorities are.
But at the same time you want to continue to listen to your stakeholders, you need to keep your hand on the pulse of the health and safety community, of our stakeholder groups, to make sure we’re headed in the right direction and that everybody’s comfortable and working together.
Ultimately this is about people and it’s about working together with people and a big part of the job is there’s a lot of leaders in the safety community, in the labour community, in the employer community.
It’s about leading leaders, really, and I think that’s going to be a big part of what my role will be consisting of.
CSR: Is it possible to get to zero workplace injuries?
Gritziotis: That’s the goal. That is the ultimate goal and that’s why I took this on.
Both at a personal and professional level I think everybody would want us to strive for zero and that’s what we’re going to strive for.
CSR: What are the biggest stumbling blocks to getting to zero injuries then?
Gritziotis: As I said it’s a very diverse workplace with diverse players. You’ve got small businesses, you’ve got medium size business and you have large businesses.
It’s about creating an awareness and getting the players to the table, talking about it.
People have to understand health and safety is not a cost, it’s an investment.
It’s an investment in the organization, it’s an investment in their bottom line, it’s an investment in their families and it’s an investment into society.
Ultimately it’s about ensuring all these players agree that yes, if these are sort of the principles, then let’s move together forward collectively.
CSR: How do you get people to see that health and safety as an investment and not a cost?
Gritziotis: I think that you need to find champions because the reality is we’re not starting from a base ground here or zero.
There are organizations out there that do look, both in the public and private sector, at prevention activities and health and safety activities as an investment and I want to build on those. I’m not going out into a workplace environment where there are no people that buy into this.
There are many people. Identifying the champions and getting them to communicate to their peers is one way of doing it.
