Safety in the workplace and cultivating a culture of safety and best practices was the topic of a panel of leading industry professionals at a recent roundtable presented by BIC Magazine.
Panelists discussed strategies around protecting workers in high-risk environments and how to build a zero-incident culture during the “Connected Safety to Protect Workers in High-Risk Environments” virtual event.
Luis Aguilar, CEO of the Health and Safety Council (HASC) and panel moderator opened the industry roundtable with a summary of the reason why HASC began in 1989: to change the culture of safety in the ship channel industry, the U.S. and the world. “We are proud to be part of the solution,” he added.
Adebayo Adekola, who serves as senior director of Freeport, Texas, site services with BASF, said developing good safety practices and instilling those habits in your workers takes time and effort.
Adekola relayed a story about the day he realized he needed to put on his seatbelt before he even started his car. “It’s a gradual process. After a while, it’s a mile down the road before you put it on,” he said. “And a while after that, you just don’t put it on anymore. The little things matter. The little things become the big things. Nobody comes to work to get
hurt." Kelly Dorsey, a health, environmental and safety professional with Marathon Petroleum, said developing a company-wide focus on safety can start with a proactive risk-reduction approach. Once you have your plan in motion, continual assessment of the process is critical to success, Dorsey said.
“What is succeeding? What is failing? There’s always room for improvement,” she said. “Once you achieve what you think is best, don’t rest on your laurels. Always be looking at it and analyzing what can make it even better.”
Retired U.S. Army Col. Ben Mitchell, who is the director of safety, health and security for Kaneka North America, said building a zero-incident culture in the workplace starts with an aligned senior leadership team.
“You have to make sure that everyone on your senior leadership team (the decision makers and stakeholders) believes that it is important to have safety as a core value,” Mitchell said.
The people who perform the work must be at the center of any successful safety plan, he said. “You must ensure that every aspect of your design includes feedback from employees,” Mitchell said. Arming employees with stop-work authority is also important.
“You must empower your employees so they feel like they own safety and have a right to speak up,” Mitchell said.
Once you grant that power to stop dangerous work to employees, not acting on issues brought to management can unravel any good safety culture, Dorsey said.“If you go out and preach to your workforce that they have the right to bring forward their concerns, and they do bring them forward and you ignore them, that has a huge impact on your safety culture because it creates that vision that: never mind, management doesn’t really care about me, they only care about what is on their priority list,” Dorsey said.
Also, rigorous and timely investigations and learning from workplace incidents must be practiced as well, Mitchell said.
Mitchell acknowledged that the last few years have been hard on industries as they navigated a changing world as the COVID-19 pandemic brought social distancing and other measures.
“What we have learned is the importance of pivoting and changing and adapting,” he said.
Albert Cotton, technical support leader of Dow Chemical Company’s Houston Hub, said using innovative methods and practices is key to making industry safer.
Cotton said Dow uses a platform called “Manufacturing 4.0” which utilizes technology to “eliminate unplanned costs and protect our people, community and environment.”
The goal, Cotton said, is to achieve a culture of zero incidents or accidents, and it can be as simple as looking at what environments pose as the biggest dangers to employees and how technology can alleviate that.
“Once you achieve what you think is best, don’t rest on your laurels. Always be looking at it and analyzing what can make it even better.”
Dow has employed cameras in many areas which used to be assigned to workers.
“Our data shows that we have eliminated thousands of confined spaces, which has greatly reduced the risk to our workers,” Cotton said. Utilizing drone technology can also enhance safety measures, he said. Drones can be launched to get a visual in areas where employees would normally have to scale ladders or scaffolding.
“There is an inherent risk of using scaffolding,” Cotton said. “The use of drones can eliminate the need for elevated work, such as roof inspections.”
Achieving a safe workplace for all employees should “be the main objective of everyone in industry,” Aguilar said.
During the event’s audience participation, Dorsey was asked which approach works best to promote safety communication between management and front-line supervisors.
“Step back for a moment and don’t have a knee-jerk reaction,” she said confidently. “Because once your employees see a knee-jerk reaction without any investigation into why something is happening, that tends to push a lot of things under the rug.”Adekola added that the responsibility for a safe and supportive workplace is everyone’s responsibility.
“It’s not just a leader’s responsibility. Engagement needs to be from the ground up, from the leader down. It truly takes everyone to sustain this culture,” Adekola said “If we start to see a behavior that is different and we don’t address it, that behavior will affect the culture. Whatever people see, people do. We need to address anything that is not aligned with the journey we want to take.”
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