Promoting Safety & Decreasing Work-Related Hazards With Those Who See It On the Job First-Hand — Our People.
In all of our facilities, safety is our top priority. From working with heavy machinery to loading freight to cleaning up after lunch, risk is inherent in any job within our manufacturing and distribution facilities. And, those who are the most hands-on are often best to see potential challenges or areas for improvement.
Taking an Employee-Driven Safety Approach
As a way to increase employee engagement within our facilities, we implemented Safety Committees company-wide with the goal of engaging as many employees as possible to understand what’s needed to complete safety tasks and promote our safety-driven culture. These committees are made up of employees in varying roles and duties to review, coordinate and evaluate Job Safety Analyses (JSAs), which break down a job into tasks and tasks into steps to understand potential hazards.
Along with the implementation of Safety Committees, we created an observation submission process, which allows all employees to bring attention to potential hazards by expressing concerns and reporting issues.
By implementing this Employee-Driven Safety Approach, employees are directly involved in driving safety throughout our facilities, making them a proactive part of the solution.
Collaboration and Open Communication Reduce Risk
How has this helped? With these solutions in place, we’ve seen an increase in collaboration across teams and maintained a healthy track record of safety, keeping our focus on employees and our commitment to their health and well-being.
“To date, the quality of the submissions has continued to increase while the total number of submissions have continued to go down due to the proactive safety measures that have taken place with this Employee-Drive Safety Approach,” states Rick Kilpatrick, Safety Manager. “The success and continuation of this approach is solely based on our employees’ engagement and willingness to participate in our safety-driven culture with the shared goal to protect the health and well-being of our most valuable asset — our people.”
See what other steps we’re taking to improve our organization as a responsible business.