For a night owl like Waste Management CEO Jim Fish, waking up for 1 a.m. safety briefings could make for a brutally long day. But Fish did it because his late father-in-law, a union pipefitter, told him if he showed up to those meetings—not just once, but regularly—he would learn a lot and build a rapport with line workers.
Fish’s father-in-law hit the nail on the head.
“It was so valuable to me in terms of learning the business and learning the people,” Fish told Fortune. “Part of what I learned—I was always a finance guy—was that it’s not always just dollars and cents.”
Waste Management has named safety as a cornerstone of the company’s operations and has set a goal to reduce its total recordable injury rate (TRIR) by 3% annually with a TRIR target of 2.0 by 2030. If the company hits the target, that means workers would have suffered two recordable injuries per 100 employees per year or per 200,000 hours worked. Last year, the company reduced overall injuries by 5.8%, according to its sustainability report, and lost-time injuries by 2.4%.
“You make investments in safety or investments in people and they don’t necessarily show up on the bottom line—at least not immediately,” Fish said. “Safety tends to show up in longer terms, and if you do have a safe organization, that will eventually show up on your income statement—but it takes a while.”
Waste Management, with $22 billion in revenue in 2024, is the U.S. and Canada’s largest provider of trash and recycling transfer and disposal services. With a market cap of about $90 billion, the Houston, Tex.-based company counts more than 60,000 employees. Fish, 63, has served as president and CEO since November 2016 but has been with the company for two decades. Prior to taking the top job, Fish held roles including chief financial officer, senior vice president of the eastern group, and area VP for Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Up until halfway through his time as CFO, Fish would go out about every four to six weeks and haul trash with crews—generally about every time he went to a middle-of-the-night safety meeting. Eventually, the board told him they weren’t crazy about the idea of him throwing trash, but he could still ride along in the trucks with workers. Now, Fish said he visits about 20 to 30 sites a year, and takes about five to 10 trips to ride along with drivers. He tells them any subject is fair game, including sports, politics, safety, or pay, but they have to make sure to chat because Fish might fall asleep otherwise.
“Most drivers are a little nervous when I get in the cab but after about 10 minutes they kind of loosen up and tell me what they’re thinking,” said Fish.
That’s why, he said, those early morning meetings were so valuable, and his learnings went far beyond injury stats and safety briefings.
He picked up on why Boston’s productivity plummeted during winter months, said Fish. He couldn’t see why there would be such a difference between winter and summer but then going out in below-zero temperatures where his hands and feet were freezing changed his mind completely, he said. It’s the kind of issue that might only show up as a data fluctuation in a corporate office but becomes clearer and more meaningful after riding through icy routes covered with snow-engulfed trash and recycling cans.
“It makes a huge difference if there’s ice and snow on the road or if the can is iced in,” said Fish. “And that sounds kind of simple, but it wasn’t something that I really, fully even understood sitting in a corporate office until I actually went out into the field.”
Another key learning came from witnessing the diversity of Waste Management’s workforce and making small tweaks to make sure employees were clearly informed.
While visiting a district in Rhode Island where about 95% of the drivers in the company’s residential business line were either Puerto Rican or Dominican, Fish attended a 1 a.m. briefing. The safety results in that line of business were pretty “terrible,” Fish admitted, and he wanted to understand why. He picked up on the fact that most of the workers spoke English but their first language was Spanish. The manager there didn’t speak any Spanish, so he used another driver to translate for him while he delivered safety information.
Fish decided to look into promoting somebody from the district who wanted to be a manager—and who was bilingual. The company made the promotion to a driver.
“Magically, or probably not magically, their safety results turned around immediately,” said Fish. “There was something being lost in the translation.”
The change also addressed an inadvertent signal that was being sent to workers, which was that they might never have an opportunity to move up in the company because they were native Spanish speakers, he said. The inadvertent message was that the managers there would likely always be “a white guy like Jim,” said Fish, who has also been working regularly on his Spanish.
Explicitly addressing that narrative improved safety results and empowered people to apply for positions they might not have thought they were qualified for previously, he said. The company also hired someone at the site to teach Spanish to other workers so they could become conversant.
“Their safety results absolutely turned around and I don’t think that was a coincidence at all,” he said. “Nothing was lost in translation anymore and the drivers couldn’t say, ‘Well, I didn’t understand what my manager was saying’ because the manager was saying it in both English and Spanish.”
The bilingual manager Waste Management hired at the site became one of the company’s best, said Fish. He unfortunately passed away from a heart attack, said Fish, but he continued up the ladder from driver to route manager, district manager, and then senior district manager. He likely would have continued moving up if he hadn’t tragically passed away. Fish noted the manager was also singled out to go on a trip for the top 200 employees to the Ritz Carlton in Hawaii with his wife.
Ultimately, in Fish’s view, the core of the company and where Waste Management differentiates itself from competitors, is at the critical field level—not the C-suite. Better understanding the workforce and how it can be more productive and efficient could best be gleaned by showing up to the grueling early mornings every month early in his executive career.
“I know my title is important, but I’m not more important than anybody else at this company,” said Fish. “I’m not a better employee or better father… we just have different level positions.”
