A heavy civil contractor called her onto an industrial turnaround over the holidays. Morale was sliding, attention was slipping, and on that kind of site those two things arrive shortly before someone gets hurt. Leslee Montgomery was given full creative control. What she brought was treats and a coloring contest, which is not what anyone expects from a safety professional, and the site’s numbers moved almost immediately.
The One Who Reads the System and the Person Standing In It
Leslee Montgomery is a professional counselor at Humanology Partners in Burnaby, British Columbia, and she spent years before that as an occupational health and safety manager on major industrial sites. She holds credentials on both sides of a line the construction industry rarely crosses, safety on one and counselling on the other. What defines her is where she chooses to stand with them: on the site, in boots, with the crew.
From a BCIT Certificate to 250 Electricians in a Hospital Build
She earned her Occupational Health and Safety certificate at the British Columbia Institute of Technology between 2010 and 2012, and she does not describe the field as a career she picked.
I didn’t choose health and safety. It chose me.
What she did choose, deliberately, was everything she stacked on top of it. While working in safety she completed a diploma in professional counselling at the Vancouver College of Counsellor Training, then a provincial instructor diploma at Vancouver Community College. She added training in peer support, substance abuse counselling and pharmacology. Nobody in site safety needs any of that, which is the point.
The safety record came first. At Trotter & Morton she spent eighteen months as site safety coordinator on the BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital project in Vancouver, serving as the health and safety point of contact for 250 onsite electricians. The results she logged there were the ones the trade recognises: leadership backing the safety program, foremen and supervisors collaborating on hazard assessments, incidents down.
Then came Neptune Bulk Terminals in North Vancouver, a facility upgrade built around transportation and coal distribution, where she worked as occupational health and safety manager with BellPhillips Safety Group, representing B&B Heavy Civil on site. Inspections, audits, safe work procedures, incident investigations. She also served a stretch as a corporate health and safety manager at Townline.
Somewhere in those years the gap stopped being theoretical. The longer she stayed in the field, the clearer it became to her that the industry was not overlooking mental health so much as leaving it out entirely. Her answer arrived from an unlikely direction, a line from the animated film Robots that she has used as an operating principle ever since: see a need, fill a need.
Boots On, and the Numbers That Followed
Since 2019 Leslee Montgomery has worked as a professional counselor at Humanology Partners, and the work happens where the hazards are. The figures she cites for the industry are hard to argue with as motivation: one in five construction workers reporting mental health struggles, and a suicide rate she puts at nearly four times the general population’s.
Which returns to that holiday turnaround, and to what she actually did with full creative control on a crew running on fumes.
I introduced holiday treats and a simple coloring contest to relieve tension and rebuild human connection.
It sounds like a morale gesture. It functioned as a safety intervention. The site reported full PPE compliance at 100 percent, better communication between crew members, and a noticeable drop in safety incidents, which is the sort of result a contractor usually spends a great deal more money chasing.
What makes it repeatable is not the contest. It is her read on what a jobsite actually is.
The most important strategic shift is recognizing that construction is a human-to-human business built on complex, simultaneous relationships with distinct site sub-cultures.
Most safety programs treat a site as a system with people inside it. She treats it as several overlapping cultures that happen to share a fence line, and she is candid about a truth that complicates every wellness initiative ever handed down from head office.
Many workers use the jobsite as a refuge to get away from personal problems.
That single observation explains why she does not arrive with corporate language, and why her interventions add no new paperwork to a crew that already drowns in it. She stays firm on safety standards while moving at the pace of the people she is trying to reach.
The clearest evidence that it lands comes from the crews themselves. The feedback she gets, from general laborers up to site leadership, tends to arrive as the same short verdict.
I get it. I get construction.
In an industry that treats outsiders with practiced suspicion, that is the only credential that opens a gate.
Why the Coloring Contest Worked
The tension on that shutdown was never really about attention spans. It was about a crew that had stopped talking to each other under pressure, on a site where not talking to each other is how people get hurt.
She did not hand them a program. She gave them a reason to stand near one another for ten minutes, and the compliance numbers followed the conversation rather than the other way around. That is the argument Leslee Montgomery has spent her career making to an industry that measures everything except the thing she watches.
Nobody on that site would have signed up for a mental health initiative. Every one of them signed up for the coloring contest.
Leslee Montgomery is a professional counselor at Humanology Partners, based in Burnaby, British Columbia. She works onsite with construction crews, supervisors and leadership teams, bringing occupational health and safety experience and counselling training to the human side of jobsite risk. To connect with Leslee or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile.
