On-The-Job Safety Starts At The Top

Whether you are taking aim at overall incident prevention or targeting a specific and recurrent source of injury, company wide buy-in and continuous scrutiny are the keys.

Improbable does not mean impossible," Kenny Davis of Canam Steel Corp. likes to remind workers in the firm,s Midwest Division. "Any accident can happen at any time when safety is forsaken," the Washington, Mo.-based safety and environmental administrator adds. His caution comes from personal experience.

When he joined Canam Steel several years ago, Davis, a welder at the time, removed a protective glove to shake out a fragment that had fallen inside. At the time, he was helping to pass a 25-foot steel cord overhead and he instinctively reached up and grabbed it. A momentary lapse, but a moment was all it took. "I happened to touch the cord at a section where it had just been welded, and it burned my hand," he recalls. Davis makes good use of that memory now, offering it as a warning to Canam,s 800 employees.

Employee education like the kind Davis now provides used to take a backseat in workplace safety. Now it is considered vital, along with management buy-in and unrelenting attention on the part of safety officers, supervisors and workers alike. The payoff: a healthier, injury-free (or almost) workforce and hefty savings.

"When management pays close attention to safety, returns on investment vary from 1:1 to 3:1," asserts James D. McGlothlin, an associate professor of industrial hygiene and ergonomics at Purdue University,s School of Health Sciences. The 3:1 ratio, he says, is considerably more common.

M. K. Ferguson in Oak Ridge, Tenn., can attest to that. The firm provides construction and construction management services to contractors at the Department of Energy,s Oak Ridge facility, a former nuclear weapons manufacturing site where low-level radioactive materials, including heavy metals, asbestos and other hazardous wastes, remain. Yet those who work in this potentially disastrous environment have logged more than 5 million hours of work with just one lost-time injury.

While the national injury rate for construction work averages nine per 200,000 hours worked, MK-Ferguson,s rate, which applies to its 250 line workers, 100 staffers and myriad employees of the 15 to 20 DOE subcontractors the firm works with was 3.5 in 1997 and an impressive 1.5 through the first half of this year. While Tennessee construction firms’Ĺ average workers comp cost is 74 cents per hour, MK-F,s is a stunning 14 cents.

Besides the direct savings in claims costs and workers comp premiums, the vast majority of MK-F projects come in at least 10 percent ahead of schedule and under budget, much of it a direct result of the company,s stellar safety performance. Since 1997, the firm has saved $6.9 million as a result of cost under-runs, says Lonnie Baldwin, director of environment, safety and health.

In mid-April, 65-employee Safeguard Business Systems in Tucker, Ga., achieved its own milestone: working five years without an OSHA-recordable incident, the only company in Georgia to achieve this record to date. (At press time, the record continued unblemished.) "Safety is our No. 1 priority, and it leads to everything else," explains Jim Still, plant manager. "We have found that, when safety is taken care of, everything else falls into place, including productivity, quality and reduced waste." And money. In this five-year period, Safeguard received $212,000 in workers comp refunds.

How do they do it? Among the numerous elements that go into a comprehensive safety strategy, Still singles out housekeeping as one of the most important. "If a facility has sloppy housekeeping, it cannot have an effective safety program," he asserts. Safeguard has a place for everything at every workstation, he adds, "and all employees are expected to keep everything in its place. For example, wood pallets and other supplies must be kept out of the aisles, where other people could trip or fall and injure their ankles or legs."

Safety first

What does it take to achieve a safety performance level that boosts the bottom line? Visit a safety conference and ask all the participants for their input, and you will likely leave with a laundry list of recommendations, keeping floors clear, spotting coworkers climbing on scaffolds, keeping a computer keyboard at or slightly below elbow height, demanding that protective garb be worn by those whose work exposes them to heat, chemicals or other hazards. But when you sort through the dizzying array of detailed processes and procedures and look at safety from the proverbial 30,000-foot level, three key requirements emerge:

- A company wide commitment backed by active and ongoing management involvement

- A program that relies heavily on worker involvement and continually seeks’Ĭand encourages’Ĭemployee input; and

-A process that keeps safety issues in the forefront virtually every day.

It all adds up to a safety mindset, or what safety specialists like to call a "living safety" philosophy. "Safety really does need to be part of an organizational culture," observes Purdue,s McGlothlin. "It must be integrated into the overall operations and processes. It cannot be something that is added on."

E.I. Dupont de Nemours & Co., based in Wilmington, Del., has nearly two centuries of such a commitment under its belt. Mike Deak, corporate director of process safety management and employee safety and health, leads the firm’Ĵs ongoing efforts. He is also a historian of sorts. A copy of Dupont,s hand-written safety regulations from 1811, nine years after the company began operating as a black powder manufacturer, hangs on his office wall. Back then, if a powder mill blew up, the company demanded that someone in senior management, usually a member of the Dupont family, be on hand to restart operations.

That has not changed. If any of the company,s 92,000 employees around the world suffer a lost workday injury or an on-the-job fatality or any other serious safety-related incident occurs, CEO Chad Holliday insists on hearing about it personally, within 24 hours. In most cases, according to Deak, Holliday gets word within a few hours. His next move: "Directly contact the site manager to find out what happened and to make sure the affected employee and family members are being taken care of properly."

Help from all levels

Having one or more safety specialists on staff is one key to an effective safety program, Lawrence R. Birkner, vice president and technical director for McIntyre, Birkner & Associates, a health, safety and environmental consulting firm in Thousand Oaks, Calif., asserts. The technical aspects of the field, the myriad of regulations from OSHA and other regulatory bodies and the ongoing research findings are too complicated and time-consuming for most line managers, supervisors and employees to absorb. "These professionals are needed to consult with managers and provide guidance on how to comply with regulations, policies and programs," Birkner says.

Formalizing a structure that guarantees and facilitates frequent communication from the top to the bottom, and vice versa, is just as vital. "It should allow everyone in the organization to view and understand safety from the same perspective and to be involved in the decision making," explains Bonnie Rogers, director of the occupational nursing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It can not be a structure where the only thing happening is that management makes decisions and employees implement them. It also can’Ĵt be a system where employees talk but management doesn’Ĵt hear or respond."

Dallas-based OxyChem, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, is a two time winner of a prestigious Chemical Manufacturers Association’Ĵs safety award, in 1997 and 1998. From 1991 to 1998, OxyChem saw an 83 percent drop in its injury incidence rate, which went from three per 200,000 hours worked to 0.52. Indeed, 23 of the company’Ĵs 36 plants had an incidence rate of 0.52 or lower and 18 had no accidents or injuries at all.

Much of that success is the result of worker involvement, says Stephen Kemp, vice president, health and safety. The firm has a safety committee whose members are a mix of safety professionals and plant managers. The group drafts policies and procedures to address new safety concerns and regulations, and then sends them to the plants where they will eventually be implemented for review by groups of line workers. The safety committee incorporates the feedback, and then sends the revised policy to top management for final approval.

"We consider our employees to be consulting partners in our day to day health and safety decision making," adds Kemp. "They share in the ownership of the program. Working as individuals and in teams, they play a key role in the development and implementation of our health and safety programs. In fact, we consider the creative ideas of our employees to be our most important assets."

MK-Ferguson,s workers are at the heart of its safety program, too, and their involvement is fueled by its Can Do Program. It features three groups: a partnership committee comprising craftspeople selected by their unions; a larger Can Do Committee that brings together members of the partnership group and craft supervisors, staff specialists such as superintendents and engineers, and senior management; and a steering committee of MK-Ferguson managers and a representative from the company’Ĵs primary client at the Oak Ridge site.

It was craft workers, in fact, who recently called management,s attention to potentially dangerous lapses in electrical safety. Ground fault circuit interrupters were not always used when the situation warranted, for example, and electrical cords were not tested for continuity in ground when they should have been. In response, the electrical superintendent and staff electricians created a course that all craftspeople are required to take. While the course does cover what electrical hazards to look for, it focuses more on what actions to take when a worker encounters a lapse in electrical safety procedures and why.

Staff education and involvement, of course, add up to more employee responsibility, emphasized in Canam Steel,s newly piloted behavior-based program. "It teaches workers to keep an eye on each other, and to observe coworkers behavior as it relates to safety," says Davis, who is responsible for the safety of some 575 employees in facilities in Missouri, Indiana and Ohio. "When one team member detected his group,s lack of a coordinated effort to lift a heavy steel cord in unison," Davis recalls, "he stopped right then and there. Then he described the upper extremity strains and back injuries that were possible consequences of not working together and stressed the importance of lifting in unison." The safety committee member has since returned to the site, Davis reports, "but each time, they were all doing it correctly."

Targeted efforts

Similar tactics can be used to address a particular work-related condition, particularly carpal tunnel syndrome and related cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs). While OSHA,s proposed ergonomics regulations have been put on hold, many companies have found that it pays to tackle ergonomics on their own.

Spiraling claims and associated costs led the Monterey (Calif.) Sheriff,s Department to take on CTDs. "I was the HR watchdog," says Captain Luther Hert, "and I routinely reviewed workers comp claims in the course of my work." First he found several employees with similar claims’Ĭand similar profiles. "Each did computer work for more than four hours a day, each complained of injuries to the hands, arms, shoulders or back, and each had a workstation with almost the same set-up."

After checking further, Hert found many more reports of similar problems. He noticed, too, that the injuries occurred primarily in clerical areas, and that other than task-specific orientation, clerical workers got no job training.

After two major injuries and a host of general complaints, Hert knew something had to be done. In 1994, the Sheriff,s Department created an ergonomics task force and sought help from ergonomics expert Alison Heller of Insite PT in Pacific Grove, Calif. She remembers her first impression: "The Sheriff,s Department felt like a paramilitary environment. Employees did what they were told. No one complained about physical problems for fear of reprisal, and supervisors discouraged claims reporting because it was a bad reflection on the manager."

When Heller investigated at the administrative department, which houses the clerical staff, she found old, ill-fitting furniture, no adjustable keyboard trays or other accommodations and workers who were fed up. In 1994 alone, nearly 10 percent of the clerical workers filed cumulative trauma claims, averaging $15,000 per case. Yet despite the high costs, Hert recalls, "we were constantly sending people to a doctor without addressing the cause."

The task force changed that. Training programs on CTD prevention were created, teaching workers to recognize and respond to early signs and symptoms such as achiness of the neck and upper extremities. They also were taught to take personal responsibility, doing specific stretching exercises regularly to reduce the risk of muscle fatigue and following other work modification techniques, like rotating tasks or walking away from the computer every 30 minutes to an hour.

Each member of the staff also had a workstation analysis to identify the need for accommodations and new (or adapted) equipment. Here, however, the entire Sheriff,s Department had to make compromises, like not being able to purchase as much new furniture as Hert and everyone else would have liked. But, he says, a "spirit of innovation" took over instead.

Making a workstation ergonomically correct, he has since found, "can be as inexpensive as the two by fours we throw away in a building project. We are not above using them to raise desks so computer monitors can be raised to the prescribed eye level. Aesthetically, it might not be beautiful," Hert admits, "but people are not getting hurt."

One aim of the program, according to Hert, was to create "a self-correcting workplace" of sorts. In addition to teaching workers to check and adjust their posture and positioning regularly, safety specialists urged them to undergo voluntary screens if they began experiencing upper body aches and pains, or redness, swelling, stiffness or numbness and tingling in the arms or wrists. That proved to be the biggest sticking point, since workers were reluctant to reveal physical problems that could end up increasing workers comp costs. To combat their hesitancy, the trainers emphasized that early reporting and response were meant to keep early signs and symptoms from becoming full-blown disorders.

Years after it started, the ergonomics task force is still up and running. "Carpal tunnel syndrome is now dealt with from the very beginning," says Hert, who was promoted to captain because of the program,s success.

"The first year we implemented remedial ergonomic adjustments our workers comp claims went down significantly," he reports. "Then I gambled a lot." Hert requested $30,000 out of the budget and had to show that something would come of it. As indeed he has the overall costs of the program accounted for $52,416 the first year, with an average per participant cost of $419. But from March 1994 to June 1998, calculations show, the Sheriff,s Department saved $360,000 in medical indemnity costs, reduced injuries by 36 percent and logged an 83 percent drop in cumulative trauma costs.

Pacific Gas & Electric waited until June 1997 to jump on the ergonomics bandwagon. Its impetus: California,s new ergonomics regs. Like the proposed federal OSHA rules, "The Cal- OSHA standard was reactive, only coming into play after a worker was injured," says Chris Monteressi, PG&E,s senior program manager and safety engineer at the time. Cal-OSHA promised that companies that did the right thing would not be affected by the regs, and he set out to create a preventive program that "would eliminate injuries before their outset."

The company,s usual approach to on-the-job injuries was to hire consultants whenever a problem arose, Monteressi recalls. Tired of outsiders coming into various departments to fix problems without ever bringing that knowledge in-house, he set out to demystify the whole idea of ergonomics and turn it into something that happened naturally and company wide.

Monteressi also began studying ergonomics claims and isolating three common risk factors: repetition, awkward posture and excessive force, like that required to file from a low position, lift reams of copier paper or replace water for the cooler. Addressing workers and management,s lack of knowledge as to how to self-correct many common ergonomic situations followed.

"I can buy a worker the most ergonomically advanced chair and desk available, but if he does not sit correctly he will continue to have problems," Monteressi points out. Yet almost anyone can be taught to spot and fix common risk factors, like slumping into (or remaining in) an uncomfortable or injury-prone position. That does not necessarily require high-priced consultants and the tape measures and angular measurement devices they are likely to use, he says.

Purchases are another area where some skepticism and adjustments are in order. "Just because an ergonomist recommends something does not mean it is the best quality or value," he asserts. Nor does it mean it is required. PG&E also controls costs by looking for alternatives. "If a $400 chair was recommended, for instance, we asked if adjustments in the existing chair would suffice."

An ergonomically sound chair must provide adequate lumbar support and be adjustable if more than one person will use it. All chairs should allow for neutral posture of the back, neck, shoulders, wrists, arms and legs, and older chairs are as likely as not to fit the bill.

Do it every day

As Monteressi found, fostering communication from one department to another and rolling out a safety program throughout the organization are vital to its success. Following the program on a daily basis at the Monterey Sheriff,s Department, for instance, workers at risk for CTDs are instructed to check their posture, take needed breaks and rotations and do stretching exercises every day is crucial as well.

In an overall safety program, that daily focus often means the difference between being event-driven or prevention-minded, Dupont,s Deak says. "While we make some changes in the safety process after an incident occurs, we emphasize continuous improvement instead."

When release valves blow and release or alarm and interlock systems fail, he continues, the tendency is to rush in and fix the problem without giving much thought to the under-lying cause. But such problems, left unsolved, could lead to explosions, burns or exposure to a toxic environment. A better approach: Work on safety every day to find and fix such problems and deal with potential disasters before they occur.