Background Screening

Rhiannon Buhre is an experienced operational leader and Occupational Safety and Health Manager at GEODIS, bringing over two decades of industry experience to her role. Starting her career in inventory control at 19, she built a strong foundation in root cause analysis and operational efficiency. Her background in third-party logistics exposed her to the fast-paced demands and safety challenges of warehouse environments, shaping her deep commitment to workplace safety. For the past three years, Rhiannon has focused on integrating safety into operations, emphasizing trust, transparency, and collaboration to build a strong safety culture and reduce workplace incidents.

Keeping people safe in today’s workplace environment spans multiple locations and roles. Occupational safety and health intersect closely with HR, requiring daily collaboration to refine policies and respond to incidents. To remain compliant and consistent—especially under the scrutiny of regulatory agencies—we often adopt standardized policies. While these are essential, they can unintentionally distance us from the individuals they’re meant to protect.

As organizations scale, the personal connection can fade. Employees may feel that policies are rules designed to complicate their day rather than measures intended for their well-being. This lack of trust is one of the most significant challenges. People want to feel seen, heard, and prioritized— but often, they don’t.

We can rebuild that trust by being present, transparent, and intentional. That means listening more, explaining the “why” behind the rules, and proving through action that people are not just a checkbox in a policy review. Building accountability doesn’t start with enforcement—it begins with relationships. When employees know they matter, they’re more likely to engage with the systems designed to protect them. That’s when there can be a shift from enforcing rules on people to building safer, more respectful environments with them.

Balancing Safety with Empathy Through Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is one of the most critical pieces to ensuring safety—especially across large networks with multiple locations. Too often, rules or policies are only known after a serious incident, particularly when OSHA has been involved. What gets lost is the story behind it—the contributing factors, the circumstances, and how the team handled it.

The focus should be on creating a culture of shared experiences and best practices, not just compliance. We all carry a burden of knowledge in safety, and we all know the potential consequences of letting risky behaviors go unchecked. But every case deserves a deeper look. Sometimes, an employee’s actions stem from extenuating circumstances—stress, personal crises, or lapses in judgment that don’t reflect their overall intent or character.

“The more consistently we reason through situations with empathy, the more opportunities we create for trust to grow through organic, positive dialogue. That kind of trust-building can shift an entire workplace culture.”

In these situations, is it possible to make a reasonable accommodation? Could this teammate be temporarily reassigned rather than removed?

It’s about separating the policy from the person—balancing safety with empathy. If you believe a jury of our peers would find the decision fair, then move forward in a way that supports both the team and the individual. That kind of accountability and care strengthens retention and trust across the organization.

Empowering Leadership Through Fairness

One of the key initiatives I’ve been driving is creating a culture where every level of leadership feels empowered to speak up— especially when it comes to advocating for our people. We’re continually working on building an environment where leaders feel comfortable bringing forward extenuating circumstances and having open, honest discussions about what’s reasonable.

It’s not just about enforcing policy—it’s about ensuring fairness, empathy, and consistency. I often call it the “jury of peers” mindset, where we weigh each situation thoughtfully and collaboratively. That culture builds trust and accountability, ultimately strengthening our safety practices.

Leveraging Informal Communication for Trust

The future depends on strengthening a culture rooted in fairness, consistency, and trust. One key factor is the grapevine—the informal communication network present in every facility. While leadership may make decisions behind closed doors, information often finds its way out. Teammates talk and share experiences.

When we consider extenuating circumstances and apply policy with empathy, the grapevine starts working for us instead of against us. Even without knowing every detail, people recognize fairness. The more consistently we reason through situations with empathy, the more opportunities we create for trust to grow through organic, positive dialogue.

That kind of trust-building can shift an entire workplace culture. The focus should be to ensure all levels of leadership feel confident speaking up, advocating for what’s right, and balancing policy with people. When teammates know their situations are considered—and that leadership is committed to fairness and accountability—true trust takes root.

Guidance for Compassionate Leadership

Allow yourself to be persuaded. We operate in a world driven by policies and procedures, but leadership requires more than enforcement—it requires empathy. That doesn’t mean abandoning rules or fairness; it means being open to sound reasoning and understanding that sometimes individual circumstances deserve a second look.

We won’t make everyone happy. That’s just the reality of being in a role where you must make decisions that affect someone’s job or initiate corrective action. At some point, you’ll be viewed as the “bad guy.” But you build trust when you consistently apply empathetic reasoning—when your decisions reflect fairness and humanity.

Over time, those teammates who once doubted you may become your strongest supporters. They’ll see that you’re not just checking boxes or hiding behind policy—you’re making space for the person behind the incident. That’s how you build credibility. That’s how you create a culture where people feel heard, respected, and understood—even when the outcome isn’t what they hoped for.

It starts with staying open-minded and letting empathy shape the way we lead.

How Organizations Build Silos, Who Gets Hurt, and What HR and Communications Must Own Communication failures kill in manufacturing. Undocumented processes create catastrophic errors. Lockout/tagout procedures exist because equipment that is not properly de-energized will kill the person working on it. Whenever a critical incident occurs, regulators do not ask if your culture was collaborative. They ask what was communicated, to whom, when, and if you can provide it. Organizations without defensible records are those that cannot answer that question.

Information flow in industrial environments is not just an engagement problem. It is a safety system. When that system is fragmented by silos, the consequences do not show up in your culture survey first. They show up in incident reports.

This is not a peripheral concern. It is the central issue. Silos are not just an organizational efficiency problem. In any workplace that carries physical risk, they are a life-safety problem. We are often the architects of how they form.

We Built This, and Then We Automated It

Organization charts establish hierarchy. Performance systems reward departmental success. We establish belonging within teams, which is genuinely valuable, and thereby create distance between them.

We then buy technology that replicates the same architecture.

In most industrial organizations, technology is not always chosen by HR. Organizations rely on many of the systems they use for people management not because they are HR-related. Their accounting architecture was purchased for SAP, Oracle, Workday, and others, and they were extended to HR because the module had already been purchased. The system that tracks your workforce, training records, and safety certifications was designed primarily to reconcile ledgers. That is not a neutral foundation for a communication infrastructure.

In the end, the platform is based on financial control, not human behavior. The system tracks. It records. It reports. However, it was never designed to deliver verified, current information to the right person on a plant floor at the right time. Technology hasn’t solved the silo problem when a verified SOP and an outdated SOP exist simultaneously in different parts of the same system and no governance model ensures workers find the right one. It’s digitized.

When Does Data Become the Silo?

Today, organizations are chasing efficiency more than ever, but are achieving less of it because the volume of data generated has outpaced the ability of humans to handle it.

"Silos are not just an organizational efficiency problem. In any workplace that carries physical risk, they are a life-safety problem."

Data, dashboards, and reports are drowning leaders at every level. They sit unread, because the people who are supposed to use them are already overloaded, managing the demands of an organization that confuses data collection with organizational intelligence.

On the floor, something more damaging is happening.

In place of being with their crew, the supervisor becomes a data administrator. The person whose experience and judgment are the actual safety system, who recognizes hesitancy, catches near misses before they become incidents, and imparts knowledge through presence, relationships, and mentorship, has been pulled away from that work to populate fields in a system that three levels of leadership above them cannot open in time.

Keyboards have been given to those closest to the risk. Engagement loss, mentoring loss, and erosion of informal knowledge transfer are real problems in industrial workplaces. They are driven, in part, by HR and operations technology that was sold as a solution to these issues.

Data has become the silo. And that silo is costing organizations not just efficiency, but the human connection that fosters safety culture.

What Deconstruction Actually Requires

The process of deconstructing silos is slow, difficult, and politically uncomfortable.

Start with a forensic diagnostic. Trace specific recent incidents backward. Ask: Who was involved? What happened? Where did the process break? Incident investigations already do this in safety-critical environments. Findings should drive structural change or retrain employees who failed. Human resources and communications must be included.

Map all your workforce management, communication, and tracking systems. Ask who chose them, why they were purchased, and whether the users find them useful or burdensome. In most cases, that last question is instructive. Frontline workers experience administrative overhead because reporting systems are not optimal.

Those supervisors, whose knowledge, mentoring, and trust cannot be replicated by a platform, should return to their actual tasks in the absence of data entry and system administration. They are the safety system between a written procedure and worker action.

It is not a structure, a cross-functional task force, or a new platform. In order to communicate safety-critically, people need to understand why procedures exist, who wrote them, and what happens when they aren’t followed. Systems don’t provide this understanding. The frontline leaders must be present enough to build it through relationships across functional lines.

The Role HR and Communications Must Own

Traditionally, HR and communications have been seen as support functions: helpful, facilitative, responsive. That’s insufficient in industrial environments, and frankly, it’s insufficient anywhere there is serious decision-making.

Through HR, we know if critical work is understood, if capability gaps are identified, and whether workforce culture is changing. A system can be created when these two functions are aligned. A silo-operated organization has gaps that can kill people in the wrong environment.

Do not ask whether your current systems will integrate with new technology. Ask whether they make people closer to the work more efficient, more present, and more connected to the information they need to stay safe or buried beneath it.

While we keep generating data, people are getting hurt— physically and psychologically—somewhere between the dashboard and the floor.

Our first step is to understand that HR and communications are not bystanders in this architecture. We must be authors.