Guy Eid of The Field Engineer talks with Rich Meredith. Rich has been a member of the Field Engineer Community since May 2025.He is an HSE or SHE as some people might know it. This is Health, Safety, and Environment. And this is a critical area of our industry as we all know. Rich has a long history in quality management, in health and safety, and in mental health also. He is a writer. His genre is fiction books and his most recent book is titled Valhalla.Quality and Health and SafetyThere's a lot of parallels between quality and health and safety. They're similar management systems, you know, and you know, safe systems of work and procedures are very very similar. The Value of People“If you want an organization to be really, really successful, you know, everyone's important and you need to make them feel important.”HSE and SHE for Field Service EngineersFrom your perspective, how do you see the link between health, safety and environment and field service? And what has been your experience? I think one of the hard things a lot of what I've noticed a lot of health and safety managers don't really want to necessarily go to - or SHE managers - don't really want to go near field service. I think the reason for that is you know, sort of a lot of health and safety or SHE managers maybe work at a facility. They have full control over the environment, the building, the equipment, everything whereas in field service it's very different. It's the customer's building and the customer's equipment. I mean, even if you're working on, you know, the equipment which your company has sold, it's still the customer's equipment and you know, where they've put it. They might have put your equipment right up against the wall when actually you need access behind the system and stuff like that. So, the egress isn't there and it makes it really difficult. So, actually the only thing you've really got control of, well, not control of, but the ability to influence is the behaviour of the field service engineers. Because they're generally not always, well, actually we didn't encourage people to work alone, but if you're talking about a field service model where it's just someone goes out to different site every day, the people are working alone. In fact, for our group because of the the different hazards, people didn't work alone. They worked in pairs cuz you needed a buddy just in case. But, you know, it's teams of two working on their own. And you know, I understand human beings are hardwired to be - sounds like I'm insulting the whole human race here - are hardwired to be lazy. We're designed to conserve energy, find the fastest way to doing things, and as we all know, sometimes implementing controls for health and safety isn't the fastest way to doing something. It's the safest way to do something. So, I could understand the kind of desire to take shortcuts. Unfortunately, those shortcuts can be dangerous, and you might get away with it maybe 99 times out of 100, but that hundredth time might be the time you get seriously hurt. So, really I think the main thing I kind of understood from that was making sure if we could try and influence behaviours, then you've kind of got yourself in a good place then cuz I can't from my perspective, I couldn't see all the hazards all our field service engineers were seeing. What I wanted to do is have a culture where if a field service engineer found something new they'd not seen before, maybe a I don't know - equipment that wasn't maybe - a nearby piece of equipment which looked dangerous, that I wanted them to feel comfortable to stick their hand up and say, "Oh, I'm not comfortable working here. That's not right. I know that's not right. That machine's not being run right and I'm worried I'm going to be affected by that. It might leak gas. Maybe there's going to be explosion." And that was really the one of the things we really wanted to underline.
