Building Safety That People Notice: Michelle Griffin on Awareness, Accountability, and Raising the Bar 

Why Safety Culture Is Built Through Attention

In safety, systems most often break down when attention fades, and people stop noticing early warning signs. Over time, familiarity dulls awareness, shortcuts feel harmless, and risks become part of the background. Most incidents are not caused by missing rules, but by drifts. These are small deviations that quietly become normal.

Michelle Griffin understands this better than most. With nearly two decades of experience across oil and gas, nuclear, manufacturing, consulting, and government projects, her approach to safety leadership is grounded in how people actually behave at work, not how policies assume they should behave.

Currently leading safety initiatives at Stevenson’s, Michelle brings a perspective shaped by auditing hundreds of organizations, many of which looked strong on paper. She has seen firsthand how high expectations, limited resources, and operational pressure collide, and how improvement only sticks when safety systems are practical enough to survive real-world conditions.

“Safety doesn’t change overnight,” she explains. “It changes when people start paying attention in the moments that matter.”

Those moments are rarely dramatic. They happen during routine tasks, familiar environments, and everyday decisions where attention is either present, or it isn’t.

A Career Shaped by Systems and Real-World Complexity

Michelle’s career in safety began through environmental science. Her academic foundation was built in environmental management, but as organizations began merging safety and environment functions to improve efficiency and align management systems, she found herself drawn into safety by design rather than intention.

That path shaped how she views the role. Safety, in her experience, is never standalone. It is influenced by how work is planned, how leaders prioritize competing demands, and how clearly expectations are communicated to the people doing the job.

Over the years, Michelle has gained experience in many industries, including managing the Environment, Health, and Safety for the Pan Am Games. She has also audited hundreds of companies, giving her a rare longitudinal view of how safety programs evolve, plateau, or regress.

That wide scope has allowed her to see patterns. The same gaps surface repeatedly across different industries, often hidden behind strong branding, mature documentation, or historically good performance.

Many safety professionals spend their entire careers inside one organization. Michelle has watched the same challenges reappear across many organizations, regardless of the sector.

Making Hazards Visible Before They Become Incidents

One of Michelle’s most effective tools is a deceptively simple exercise called “Spot the Hazard.”

Using real photos taken during audits and site visits, participants are given five seconds to identify hazards before moving to the next image. The outcome is consistently eye-opening. Even experienced managers and supervisors miss the hazards they pass every day.

This exercise highlights a critical reality in safety: hazard recognition is not automatic. It is a learned skill that improves with practice and deteriorates without it.

“Two people can walk into the same space and see completely different hazards,” Michelle says. “That’s why awareness matters so much.”

The five-second time limit is deliberate. On a worksite, people rarely have the luxury of time. Decisions are made quickly, often under pressure, distraction, or fatigue. Training people to recognize risk in those conditions is far more effective than teaching policy in isolation.

Over time, this type of visual, time-constrained training changes behavior. People begin scanning their environment differently. They pause where they used to rush. They speak up sooner.

The Real Purpose of Hazard Reporting

Michelle takes a pragmatic view of hazard reporting, particularly in environments where participation feels forced, inconsistent, or performative.

For her, the value of hazard reporting is not the form itself. It is the habit it creates.

“Hazard reporting is really about awareness,” she explains. “The more hazards we talk about, the more people start to see them.”

Even reports that feel minor or repetitive serve a purpose. They reinforce the expectation that hazards are worth noticing and discussing. Over time, repeated reporting builds shared language around risk and increases situational awareness across teams.

Silence, on the other hand, is rarely a sign that everything is safe. More often, it indicates disengagement or normalization of risk. When hazards stop being reported, people usually stop looking.