From Horror to Heaven: A Safety Story
I was working as Purchasing, Planning and Inventory Control (PPIC) Manager for the Anchor-Hocking Packaging Company when the company decided to close our plant and open a new state-of-the-art factory in another state. I was offered a promotion to work at the new plant, but because I couldn’t relocate, I had to find another job.
I was then hired as an Operation Manager for a privately held company that manufactured private label fem-hy, incontinence and baby diaper products. This was a fun and fast-paced environment. I loved it! Other than one MAJOR PROBLEM during my first year there, the other 13 years were amazing. What was that ONE ISSUE during year-one that I had to contend with? Employee injuries.
THE SAFETY PERFORMANCE WAS BEYOND HORRIFIC! I’m not talking about first aid injuries. I’m talking about finger amputations and hand mutilations. And I’m not talking about rare occurrences. I’m talking about weekly occurrences. It was a brutal experience to see my valued employees incurring major injuries and suffering undeservingly so. It wasn’t their fault that safety was so poor here.
Although the Recordable Injury Rate (RIR) and the Lost Time rate (LT) and our Workers Compensation Insurance costs where all insanely high, this issue meant way more to me than all of that. This issue was about protecting my employees. My team. My people.
I’ve read and heard before that most injuries are behavioral based. That may be true, but the responsibility to improve behaviors falls on any company’s leadership, In this case, me. Fixing safety and eliminating injuries quickly became my number one priority. I struggled to know where to start though. This issue was not about safety compliance. This was an all-out war against serious employee injuries.
After some thought a course was charted. This was a multifaceted plan to eliminate all injuries. Using many resources, below was the plan that we rolled with:
Change the Mentality: Safety projects take time. I didn’t have time. Even one serious injury was one too many. We had to get word out to employees that we care more about their wellbeing than we do machine uptime. “If you need to clean or adjust a machine component, shut the machine off. It’s really okay”. You see operators were not connecting the risk of the task to the injury itself. They thought that if they performed an unsafe act 100 times in a row, then the one hundred and first time, would be fine too. I had to get the message out that if we couldn’t operate a machine safely, then we wouldn’t operate it at all. "People above productivity" was the simple message I sent. I enforced this as I walked the production floor and reenforced it at companywide meetings.
Document Safety Procedures: After setting the expectations and aligning the decision-making process, “people above productivity”, then we needed formalize things. First, we identified and documented the safest and best methods to perform required tasks. Our machines operated at lightning speed. Machines needed constant attention and human interface to maintain steady operations. So, the challenge for us was to identify all the operational tasks, then find safe methods to perform them all at the highest possible efficiency. Most important was the priority order that was baked into each procedure: safety first, quality second, efficiency third. After each procedures was documented, everyone was trained.
Supervisor Engagement: Without support, engagement and enforcement on the part of our shopfloor leaders, nothing that I could do would make any difference. The shop floor is where all of the magic happens. For consistency I needed the supervisors to have a structured system.
- Daily Safety Topics: Our EHS manager was tasked with providing the supervisors with a daily safety topic to be discussed during their daily team huddles.
- Daily Safety Contacts: Every day each supervisor had to make a safety contact with an employee. This was a simple conversation with an employee about an observed safety behavior. Some of these were favorable and some were corrective. The supervisors documented these safety contacts and submitted a form to EHS every week. This helped support the enforcement of our new safety procedures.
- Monthly Safety Projects: Every supervisor was required to tackle a small safety project every month. Some projects were to purchase things like better gloves or utility knives and others were centered around improving equipment safety features.
Improve the Guards: Although it is true that most injuries are behavioral issues, equipment matters too. I have a friend who flies helicopters in the military. His engine failed once in flight, and he crashed. The military classified the cause of the crash as “Human Error”. To me though, the “Human Error” classification should only be taken so far. Sometimes, equipment does fail us and injuries occur as a result. Because of this fact, our Engineering and Maintenance teams were assigned the task to upgrade the machine guarding on every process in the plant. Essentially, we wanted the machines to be designed to protect the employees and unless an operator bypassed an safety device, they couldn’t possibly be injured.
Safety Awareness Campaign: We wanted to give safety a name and a face and make it fun. We asked our Packaging Artwork Department to create a safety mascot in cartoon form. Then we had a mascot naming competition. The winner received a gift card to a local restaurant. Thus, was born our safety mascot, “Safety Sam”. Posters of Safety Sam saying safety type things were posted throughout the plant and tee shirts had a logo of our beloved mascot. Long live Safety Sam!
Safety Incentives: Some EHS managers might frown on giving incentives to employees for being safe. They think that if workers are incentivized, they simple won’t report their injuries. Maybe that is true if your employees are suffering lots of first aid injuries. But when the injuries are serious, incentives work. People start to look out for each other. Our incentives were focused on small teams of people. If they went injury free for a month, they got a team meal. For three months, they received a shirt. For six months, a sweatshirt and for a year – it was a vacation day! Trust me, I was glad to award these!
All of these little steps added up to a perfect safety record. After walking into a place of absolute horror the first year, the plant went the next full year completely injury free! This is one of my greatest accomplishments as a leader. Transforming a culture and preventing injuries was a very rewarding experience! One that I’ll never forget.
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