Ep. 35: Please Play This Song On The Radio (w/ Michael Bathgate and Taylor Hewlett)

Even though they're not really into punk rock, Michael and Taylor from Imperial Oil are pretty badass (and the title of this episode is a NOFX song that Michael somehow remembered, so we'll take it). And they're movie stars in a video from Energy Safety Canada about the 4Ds from Learning Teams, Inc. The Imperial boys are the first to tell you they aren't safety people - they're field ops guys just trying to solve some problems. Pretty fucking punk, right? Shit wasn't going the way it should, so they just figured out what would work. Not perfection, but progress. "If you just go in and do it, and you do it from a place of caring," people are going to be on board. What the hell are the 4Ds Michael and Taylor are talking about (5 if you count Provan, because he's a D for sure)? They're questions about what folks see at work that are dumb, difficult, different, or dangerous. Turns out talking to people about work does some other stuff too: like a 53% reduction in absenteeism and massive increases in time-on-tool productivity. Weird, right? Figuring out how work gets done and addressing it like an adult helps make work suck less. For a lot of people, punk rock is a catalyst for being heard, for building family, and for expressing how they feel. For the teams at Imperial, using something like the 4Ds was a catalyst, too. Sometimes, it identified some problems that looked a whole lot like the supervisors and leaders in the organization. Those are tough conversations (like how bass players and ska bands are the problem a lot of times, too), but the boys took the conversations on and did the hard yards to figure out how to make leadership better. Asking questions isn't the solution, though, and that's why you should check out the rest of the episode. Michael and Taylor have got a lot more to share about how they started learning about performance, labels, and leadership. They're pretty punk without even trying, and that's "The punkest mother fucker I ever did see. Ah hell, he's even more punk than me." Got a NOFX quote in there after all, punks. Shoulda gone for Propaghandi, since they're a Canadian band, but whatever.