July/August 2007
ReMA's Scrap Safety Blueprint process—a 20-point safety checkup that's free for ReMA members—can help ensure that safety is the foundation of all your company's operations.
By Barney Boynton
I live for "aha!" moments—those moments of clarity when all the pieces of a problem come together in your mind and you can see your way to the solution. What do such instances have to do with safety? Quite a bit, actually.
By now, you've probably heard about ReMA's Scrap Safety Blueprint, but you might be wondering what that process is all about. In short, it's a safety "aha!" generator. In a scrap operation, safety—or, more accurately, the lack of it—is a problem that needs a solution. Finding the solution is often much more difficult than implementing it. The ReMA Scrap Safety Blueprint process helps you identify the safety solutions that work for your company.
The process takes a tough look at your safety program and answers three basic questions: What safety functions does your firm do well? What safety areas could use some improvement? And what can you do to make your safety program better? You'll likely have an "aha!" moment sometime during the blueprint process, and suddenly your safety process is going to get that much better.
Here's how it works: A member of ReMA's safety staff (OK, usually me) will visit your facility, sit down with your leadership team, and facilitate a meeting to explore the key elements of your safety program. The focus is less on OSHA compliance and more on creating a safety culture in your operation. The meeting, which lasts from three to six hours, relies heavily on input from everyone on your leadership team. The end product is a safety plan, or blueprint, that identifies what you can do in your operation to make it safer.
What's the cost? It's free—if you're an ReMA member.
What's the catch? Your company must sign the ReMA Safety Pledge to qualify for this service, and you must commit to having your leadership team participate in the process—small steps toward getting your company on the road to great safety performance.
Safety Points to Ponder
ReMA's Scrap Safety Blueprint process uses a scorecard to evaluate the current state of your company's safety program. Your leadership team discusses the 20 key safety elements on the scorecard, then it gives the company a numerical score on each of those elements. The numerical rating helps the team identify what's working well and what needs improvement. Following are the scorecard's 20 safety elements:
1. Safety policy statement. How committed to safety are you? A great way to demonstrate your commitment is by creating and signing a safety policy that essentially says, "We put safety first in everything we do." That's what the ReMA Safety Pledge is all about. It reads
[Company name] is committed to providing a safe and healthful workplace to our employees. As members of the Recycling Materials Association, we pledge to consider worker and customer safety in every decision we make. Our mission as a company is to serve customers and produce high-quality product safely. If we cannot do it safely, then we will not do it at all.
Signing the ReMA Safety Pledge or a similar statement is a great step, but that's just the start of the safety-excellence process. Too many times those statements get signed, stuffed in a binder, and forgotten. The best safety policy statements are highly visible. One scrap company opens every safety meeting by reading its safety statement. Another printed the statement on stickers that are applied to every employee's hard hat.
A good safety policy statement becomes a living, breathing document in the organization, one that leaders invoke when making tough decisions. Say, for example, your company is considering buying forklift A, an older, discounted model that's missing some safety features, or forklift B, a newer, more expensive model that comes with all safety equipment. Your commitment to your firm's safety policy can help you make the right choice.
2. Communications. How does the company communicate safety throughout the organization? Most small, family-run scrap companies have a great communication method—some call it breakfast. As companies start to grow, communications can start to break down. The people you used to meet for breakfast get too busy or too distant, spread out across many yards and states. That can affect communications in your company in many ways. As in the "telephone" game we all played in school, a message from the top changes as it works its way through the ranks—if it makes it through the ranks at all.
So when it comes to safety, you have to make sure that (1) the message is getting through in the first place and that (2) the right message is getting through. Use different types of communications such as verbal instruction, safety posters, and safety videos. Keep in mind that there's no single "best" way to communicate. Whatever works for your operation and employees is the best approach.
Don't forget that communication doesn't happen unless someone receives the message and understands it. The scrap industry faces a huge challenge in overcoming the language barrier with non-English-speaking employees. Just because a person smiles and nods, that doesn't mean he or she understands you. For many people, smiling and nodding simply mean, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
3. Safety results tracking. If you want to have a great safety program, you need to track your safety performance and results. You can't count on luck to achieve your accident-free goal. By tracking your safety results, you can identify where your company has had safety problems in the past and what caused those problems, then you can develop a plan to prevent the same problems from recurring. Share your findings with the whole company; otherwise, no one will have a reference point for future improvement.
4. Safety goal-setting. When NASA decided to put a man on the moon, that goal became the job of everyone in the organization. If you asked the janitor to describe his goal, he would have said, "to put a man on the moon." That said, goals without action steps are just dreams. NASA didn't just wish its goal to happen; it had a strategic plan to make it happen.
When I ask owners of scrap companies about their safety goal, they always answer, "zero accidents." But when I ask how they intend to get there, I get many different responses. Some companies establish a plan at the beginning of the year for planned safety activities, assigned responsibilities and accountabilities, and due dates. For other companies, the Scrap Safety Blueprint is the first time they've done any formal safety program planning.
5. Employee involvement. Most safety programs begin as top-down initiatives driven by upper management. Because management can drive change in the organization, this approach is an easy way to achieve early success. To succeed in the long term, however, employees have to buy into the safety process and make management's goals their own. They have to find their own motivation to work safely and ensure that their coworkers also operate safely. It isn't efficient to have a safety director walk around all the time telling workers to be safe. That approach also isn't practical because the person can't be everywhere at once. Plus, most employees hate to be told what to do all the time, so the safety guy becomes the target of resentment.
Instead, think about how every employee can play a role. For instance, you're your safety director do all the inspections, or can you get others on staff to do some? Before you pick up the phone and call a consultant, check with your employees. They work there every day, so they probably know where all the hazards are and how to fix them. The point is this: Companies with a high level of employee involvement tend to have better safety records, happier employees, and the confidence that their safety programs are just as effective whether top management is on the premises or not.
6 & 7. Work safety rules and progressive discipline. Many scrapyard owners have told me, "I can't get my guys to wear hard hats. No matter what I do or say, they won't wear them." In contrast, not a single owner has said to me, "I can't get my guys to stop stealing money from the cash drawer. No matter what I do or say, they just keep stealing money."
Aha! Your safety rules are only good if you enforce them. Allowing employees to break safety rules is the same as letting them steal; it just happens at a slower pace. Sooner or later that person is going to get injured, and the cost is going to far exceed what he or she could have taken out of a cash drawer. Consistency and progressive discipline are the key to effective enforcement of safety rules. You need to set rules, make sure workers understand them, and enforce them. That's easy to do—until you find that your best worker for the past 20 years just can't stop himself from bypassing machine guards. A tough decision, yes, but remember that firing someone for such a safety violation could save the person's life. Unfortunately, hospitals and graveyards are full of workers who were given "one more chance."
8. Reward and recognition. The journey to zero accidents can be a long one, so it's good to recognize positive steps along the way. There are hundreds of ways to use incentive programs to motivate people and reward positive behavior. The first step is to figure out what behavior you need to change. If workers don't wear their hard hats all the time, set up an incentive program that will motivate them to do so. Recognize the success when you get 100-percent compliance, then move on to next behavior you want to change. Always tie the reward to the result. You'd be amazed at how many companies with safety incentive programs have lost track of what they're trying to achieve.
9. Hiring for safety. Does safety start on the employee's first day of work or during the interview? If you bring safety into the interview process, you can save a lot of money and headaches. By asking safety-related questions to potential hires, you can discover their feelings about such topics as wearing personal protective equipment and complying with safety rules in general. You can learn what safety training they received at other jobs. This kind of due diligence can save you from making bad hires. Remember: It's much easier not to hire someone than it is to fire someone.
10. New employee orientation. How do you train new employees on safety issues? Do they learn about safety before starting work their first day? Some companies try to make new employee orientation an endurance game: The new hire passes if he or she makes it through eight hours of sitting in a room alone watching safety videos without falling asleep or running away. The best companies commit significant time to make sure all new hires have the tools they need to work safely. This includes classroom instruction and on-the-job training. Or maybe you think your employee turnover is too high to do the job right? If so, please reread "Hiring for safety" above.
11. Ongoing training. Training is the most important factor in making your operation safer, so it needs to be an ongoing thing, not a one-time shot. Ongoing training keeps every employee focused on safety. It's critical, though, to test employees—formally and informally—on their safety knowledge to make sure the training is working. After your next safety training session, for example, hit the yard a few days later and ask a few employees what they learned. That's a good indicator of what they're getting out of the sessions.
12. Safety committee. Remember employee involvement? A safety committee is one of the best ways to make that happen. Invite employees to organize a safety committee, and get them fired up about what they can accomplish. Break the paradigm that safety committees are just a bunch of employees sitting in a room doing nothing. Get them in the yard doing safety audits. Let them handle some of the safety training. Heck, solicit their input on selecting safety glasses. Your safety committee can be the best safety resource in your company.
13 & 14. Safety audit and follow-up. Inspecting for safety hazards is another essential element of a great safety record. Conditions change fast in a scrapyard. Because everyone seems to have 100 tasks to do at once, it's easy to walk by safety hazards without seeing them. A formal inspection process allows you to take a step back and see what's really going on. One word of caution: Don't bother doing a safety inspection if you aren't going to address the problems you find. That's a surefire way to kill your safety program.
15. Accident investigation. If you accidentally burn down your plant and a few of your neighbors' homes, you'll likely be motivated to figure out what happened and how to prevent it next time. The secret to a good accident investigation program is treating small incidents the same as big incidents. Learn from losses—large and small—and close calls. Investigate where that piece of steel came from that just went zinging by a worker's head. The cold reality is you just avoided a fatality by 6 inches. Investigate the root causes of such incidents to make sure they don't happen again.
16. Regulatory compliance. Just as you need a good maintenance program to keep your equipment operating at its best, you need a maintenance program to make sure your safety program is running smoothly. These efforts include keeping training records up to date, following an inspection schedule and recording the results, and making sure your safety processes meet all rules and regulations.
17. Emergency planning and rescue. Most companies don't like to think about accidents and emergencies, but you have to do precisely that ahead of time to be prepared for them. Let's say, for example, that a worker is seriously injured somewhere in the back 10 acres of your yard. What would you do? Who calls for help? What's the right number to call? Who's in charge of getting the emergency medical personnel to the injured worker? Every second counts in emergency scenarios, so you have to have a response plan that looks beyond "Call 911."
18. Emergency evacuation. It's equally imperative to have an emergency evacuation plan. After all, some circumstances—such as a catastrophic building fire—require you to get everyone off the premises ASAP. How do you tell them? Where should they go? What should they do when they get there? An organized evacuation plan can protect your employees as well as rescue personnel. It can prevent worst-case scenarios such as sending rescue workers into a burning building to look for workers who got in their cars and drove home.
19. Return to work. On your way to zero accidents, you might have a few situations in which employees are out of work due to injury. Getting employees back to work, even in a limited capacity, can save you a bundle in insurance costs. Studies have shown that workers recover faster when they're at work on restricted duty than when they're sitting on the couch at home watching lawyer ads on TV.
20. Visitor control. Do thoughts of visitors and customers in your scrapyard keep you up at night? They should. You'd be amazed at the staggering number of lawsuits and financial awards each year related to visitors and customers who are injured or killed in scrap operations—and the number is growing. Visitors are incredibly vulnerable to injury when they're around operating equipment, bales of material, and other potential scrapyard hazards. Why allow them to get in harm's way in the first place? Separate them from all loading/unloading, processing, and storage areas, and empower every employee to look out for their safety.
So did you have any "aha!" moments about your safety program? Did you pick up a few ideas to improve your company's program? If so, that's great. You're another step or two down the road toward safety excellence. If you'd like additional help traveling that road—and if you're an ReMA member—contact the ReMA safety staff to schedule a Scrap Safety Blueprint visit. That one-day investment could reap huge safety dividends for your company in the future. •
Barney Boynton is director of safety outreach for ISRI.
Publisher's Note: For more information about ReMA's safety resources or to schedule a Scrap Safety Blueprint visit, contact Anne Marie Horvath, ReMA's safety program manager, at 202/662-8511 or annemariehorvath@isri.org. For a copy of the ReMA Safety Pledge, visit www.isri.org/safety.
ReMA's Scrap Safety Blueprint process—a 20-point safety checkup that's free for ReMA members—can help ensure that safety is the foundation of all your company's operations.