It’s no exaggeration to say Jordan LeFever’s lifelong dream has been to work in the health and safety field. Jordan grew up in Butte, Montana, where the community’s mining history played an important role in advancing workplace health and safety protections in the United States.
“I was drawn to industrial hygiene because many workplace hazards aren't obvious and are often invisible,” he says. “Understanding and managing those hazards requires a fun combination of science, technical knowledge and practical problem-solving.”
A safety professional since 2014, Jordan joined Weyerhaeuser in 2018 as safety manager at our plywood and lumber mills in Kalispell, Montana. He later moved to the same role at our Columbia Falls MDF plant before joining the Corporate Health & Safety team as a safety liaison in 2023, where he supported development of many of the safety tools and programs our company uses today. Earlier this year, Jordan accepted the role of corporate industrial hygiene, occupational health & product stewardship leader.
“It’s not a new role for the company, but rather part of an existing role that was split,” he says. “I focus on governance, helping ensure we meet regulatory requirements and continuously improve how we protect employee health. I also spend a lot of time helping people build the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and manage health risks across the organization, which is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.”
MEET JORDAN
Your title is corporate industrial hygiene, occupational health & product stewardship leader. Tell us what you do.
My role is to support the organization’s efforts to anticipate, recognize, evaluate and control occupational and health hazards in the workplace. As part of that, I lead our industrial hygiene, occupational health and product stewardship programs across the organization.
I've always enjoyed solving complex problems that sit at the intersection of people, science and operations. This role gives me the opportunity to work with teams across the company to understand how work gets done, identify opportunities to better protect employee health, and then help build practical solutions that work in the real world. I also get to learn something new every day.
Tell us what your day is like.
Every day is different. Some days I’m in front of a computer advising teams, while other days I’m out in our mills, Timberlands operations or distribution sites with my boots on the ground. I might be meeting with site teams to review exposure data, discuss regulatory changes or evaluate proposed projects. The one constant is collaboration. I work closely with operations, safety, engineering and product stewardship teams across all levels of the business.
What's your favorite part of the job?
I enjoy helping people and teaching. One of the most rewarding parts of my role is taking complex health and safety concepts and making them practical and accessible for the people doing the work. I also enjoy solving difficult problems and continuously learning. Every site, process and operation is a little different, which means there's always something new to learn and a new challenge to solve.
I love Weyerhaeuser. I’ve always been treated well and supported throughout my career. We have talented people across the company who are committed to continuous improvement, and there’s a strong willingness to share ideas and learn from one another. That collaborative culture helps us continue to innovate and get better every day.
You must have some challenges. What are they?
Industrial hygienists focus on hazards that aren't always obvious. Many of the things we're concerned about can't be seen, touched, felt or smelled. Because those hazards are often invisible, it can be difficult to communicate risk and build support for the actions needed to control them.
The irony is that much of our success comes from preventing issues before they occur. When we're doing our job well, nothing happens.
That's why I spend so much time helping people build safety competency, which is a core part of our new safety system. Everybody wants to go home safe and healthy at the end of the day, and giving people the knowledge to recognize and manage health risks is one of the best ways to make that happen. I've found that the best solutions are the ones that people understand and take ownership of themselves. To me, that's where the 3 C’s of commitment, competency and compliance come together. When people understand the risk, are committed to doing the right thing and have the skills to do it well, good outcomes usually follow.
Tell us something about your job that might surprise people.
A lot of industrial hygiene work is investigative work. We collect and interpret data, evaluate exposures, study work processes and try to understand how people, equipment and the work environment interact. In many ways, it's like detective work. You're gathering evidence and using science to understand risks that often aren't immediately visible. Sometimes the answer isn't where you expect it to be.
What advice would you give to people who want a job like yours?
Build a strong foundation in science and be excited about problem solving. Spend time learning how operations, processes and people actually work. And ask questions, always stay curious and humble, and never stop learning.
Have you worked on any really big projects in the past few years that you're proud of?
Quite a few! Most recently, we developed and implemented a standard for how we handle alternative methods of hazardous energy control. Advances in technology have created new ways to protect workers and manage hazardous energy, and we wanted to ensure our standards reflected both regulatory requirements and industry best practices.
A few years ago, I led the routine risk assessment standardization effort between Wood Products and Timberlands to develop the risk assessment tool we use now, HRD (“Hazard-Risk-Decide”). The challenge there was that each business had their own tool, and we liked elements of each. We were able to achieve the best of both worlds by merging them into a common tool that we can all work from.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak at the American Society of Safety Professionals conference in Anaheim, California, about prevention through design and proactively mitigating working-at-height hazards. I shared how organizations can take practical solutions that work in one facility and apply them across similar operations. What's especially exciting is being able to build those lessons into new projects from the beginning, creating safer workplaces by designing hazards out before construction even starts.
Who are your customers?
Everybody in our organization. Industrial hygiene and occupational health touch almost every aspect of our business, so my customers range from frontline employees and supervisors to engineers, project teams and business leaders. At the end of the day, we're all working toward the same goal: protecting people, the environment and the trust that allows us to operate in the communities we serve.
What do you like about your team?
Our team is very knowledgeable and collaborative. We have people with expertise in a wide range of disciplines, and there's a genuine willingness to share ideas, challenge each other, and help each other succeed. Everyone is focused on doing what's right for our people, the environment and the company.
Tell us about your other interests. What do you like to do when you're not at work?
My favorite thing is spending time with my family: my wife, our three little kids, two Goldendoodles and a cat. We live in Kalispell, so we spend a lot of time outdoors and around our backyard pool in the summer months. I spend much of my summer as a pool boy! My oldest son has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, so when we bought our house, we wanted it to be the place where everybody would want to come to him. We had four or five pool parties this summer, which isn’t exactly stress relieving, but it’s rewarding.
I’m also a college football fanatic. And during the pandemic, I decided to teach myself how to cook — my 5-year-old calls me “Chef Daddy” now. I also play the guitar and saxophone, and I recently picked up woodworking. I’ve been building furniture, cutting boards and other projects as gifts. Looking at that list, I guess I’m not very good at sitting still.
A self-described college football fanatic, Jordan enjoys cheering on the Montana Grizzlies.
Jordan playing guitar at a local brewery.
