JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
A model safety program has led CMC Metal Recycling-East to more than 2 million work hours without a lost-time accident.
By Kim Fernandez
When Commercial Metals Co.’s CMC Steel Group (Seguin, Texas) purchased a steel company headquartered in Columbia, S.C., the purchased company’s safety record was far from stellar.
“Back then, [the company] had an incident rate over 20,” says Brian Mayer, safety and environmental manager of what’s now CMC Metal Recycling-East. “It didn’t have a formal safety program in place.” Like many companies in the scrap industry, it provided basic safety equipment and dealt with incidents as they occurred, but it did little to prevent them.
One asset CMC brought to the merger was its deep-rooted commitment to safety. The company hired Mayer shortly after the purchase and charged him with improving the division’s safety record. Twelve years later, CMC Metal Recycling-East now boasts one of the best safety ratings in the industry, with an incident rate of about 1.4.
How did it happen? Well, it wasn’t overnight, and it wasn’t easy. In fact, achieving that kind of safety record required changing the mindset of every single company employee so that he or she brings safety to the forefront of every workday. And it meant doing that in a way that gets workers to participate willingly and enthusiastically, not just to comply for fear of being caught by a manager.
“It’s the right thing to do,” says Stan Davis, area manager of CMC Metal Recycling (Lexington, S.C.), one of the group’s facilities. “I don’t want to go out there and get hurt, and I don’t want anybody else getting hurt, either.”
Driving that message through the organization took time, but the company’s managers and employees now say every minute and dollar the company spent has been more than worth it.
A peer-based program
The multitiered program CMC Metal Recycling-East implemented emphasizes safety both on the job and at home for its several hundred employees. The company developed the initial program at its steel mill, CMC Steel-SC (Cayce, S.C.), by asking for the input of those who are most affected by accidents—the workers and their families. The wife of a mill employee suggested the program design, Davis says. “It fit the steel mill, and we tailored it and adopted it here at the scrap facility.”
The “Others Reminding Others” program, or ORO, encourages plant workers to watch each other for potentially unsafe actions and remind their peers of proper safety procedures. The heart of the program is its safety observation cards, which are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The company issues cards to the entire staff, and each time a worker observes a potentially unsafe situation and helps a peer correct it—by reminding a forklift driver to wear his seat belt, for example—he or she fills out a card and deposits it in a drop box. At the end of the month, the company tallies up the cards it has collected.
“All of these things are unsafe acts that, if somebody hadn’t seen and said something to somebody else, could have ultimately resulted in an accident,” Mayer says.
When the ORO program kicked off about three years ago, the impact was gradual. The number of accidents began drifting down a little bit the first few months, and then a little bit more, until today the company is at more than 2 million hours worked without a lost-time accident, and counting.
Accenting accountability
It’s easy to imagine that workers would perceive the program as snitching on their colleagues, and at first, they did. In the first few months of the program, the managers didn’t see a whole lot of observation cards coming in. So they began setting a goal.
“When we started, we required each employee to have four safety observations per month, or one per week,” Mayer says. “That was a challenge at first. Once it got going, we bumped it up to six observations per month.”
The managers also started tracking who turned in cards and who didn’t. “If an employee didn’t make the four per month, he’d be counseled by his supervisor as to why he wasn’t doing them—did he not understand, did he need more training?” Mayer explains.
“We identified people who said they weren’t going to do it, that this wasn’t their job,” he says. “We actually dismissed some employees over it. If you’re not concerned about your safety or other employees’ safety, quite frankly, we don’t really want you at our job site.
“A few people made that career choice and went to work for somebody else,” he continues. “But once employees saw how important this is, once it really got rolling, they saw how much better this was making the facility to work in, and the buy-in was there.”
Today the firm’s Lexington facility, which employs about 100 workers, routinely receives 850 to 950 safety observation cards a month in its boxes or at weekly safety meetings, where some supervisors encourage their employees to talk about the observations they have made over the past few days.
The company also adopted an incentive program. It divided each yard by department into teams of about 10 to 20 employees. When a month goes by without an OSHA-reportable accident in a team, each team member receives $10. After the second accident-free month, each team member receives $20. The incentive increases by $10 per accident-free month until it reaches $60. It stays at that level, with each team member receiving $60 each month, unless there’s an accident, at which point the incentive drops back down to zero and the count starts all over again.
“Team members can earn an extra $720 per year just by working safely,” Mayer says. “But in the six months it takes to ramp it up [after an accident], they lose out on $210. So if that guy over there isn’t wearing glasses and he gets something in his eye, it’s going to cost you $210.”
That’s not a huge amount of money, but Mayer says that’s intentional. “We didn’t want to make it so lucrative that people start hiding accidents and injuries because they want the incentives,” he explains. “But we wanted it at the level that they are really being rewarded. And to be honest, if we didn’t have an incentive and we worked unsafely, we’d spend that money and a whole lot more on doctor’s visits and treatments and workers’ comp.”
The company also treats team members to lunch one day for every month that remains accident-free. And every time the team reaches a milestone of days without an accident, the team members receive gifts commemorating it, from T-shirts to jackets to watches.
Though the bonuses, lunches, and gifts sound expensive, the managers say it’s all relative. A single back injury could set the company back $50,000 or more, Mayer notes. “Our company conducted a study a few years back,” Davis says. “And what we found out was that for every dollar we invest in our safety programs, we save $25.”
Results through repetition
The safety program has other components as well. CMC has a longstanding company policy, for example, that every supervisor must hold a weekly safety meeting with his or her employees. Mayer discovered that though the meetings were taking place (for the most part), they weren’t all that informative.
The supervisors would “get up and say the same stuff—wear your hard hats this week,” he says. “We found out that supervisors didn’t have anything to talk about.”
Mayer started scheduling all safety meetings himself, and he began providing the supervisors with monthly packets of information so that all of the meetings in a particular week would cover the same material. “I basically give them a pre-canned, one-page safety meeting [agenda] for each week,” he says. “The meeting rosters come in, and we track them and make sure everybody’s doing their meetings.” Now it has become a habit for all employees.
One part of the company’s extensive new-employee orientation program goes over all of the expected safety precautions and procedures over the course of one week. “We hear from our new employees that they’ve never worked anywhere before where the company took so much time to promote their safety,” Mayer says. “They appreciate it—they see it as a benefit.” (Learn more about the company’s orientation program in Scrap’s next safety series feature, in the March/April 2007 issue.)
CMC Metal Recycling-East also mails to workers’ homes a quarterly magazine designed to promote safety for every member of the family outside of work hours.
“We really try to push safety all around,” Davis says. The magazine “costs a couple hundred dollars a quarter, but it’s pretty effective for the [spouses] and kids to see it all, too. My kids, they’re 6 and 10, they see it, and a lot of times they’ll tell me about it as soon as I get home.”
With the cards, the weekly meetings, the orientation, the magazines, and more, that might seem like a lot of repetition of the safety message, but Mayer justifies that by describing a study he saw once from the U.S. Treasury.
“The study said that the average person sees a penny 1,000 times in a year,” he says. “But if you give everybody paper that has two circles drawn on it and you tell them to draw what’s on the front of a penny in one circle and what’s on the back of a penny in the other, nobody ever can do it.
“That’s why we constantly go over safety, over and over and over,” he says. “You’ve got to keep it right there in front of everyone.”
Directions to success
Mayer says “there’s no silver bullet” that makes CMC Metal Recycling-East’s program successful. “It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a little bit of all of its parts.” But no safety program will work, he says, unless it’s accepted from both the top down and the bottom up. From the top, “if you don’t have management buy-in, it’s just about impossible to have a strong safety program,” he says. CMC CEO Murray McClean “is very passionate about safety,” Mayer says. “It’s the one thing that he stresses, more than anything else. Safety first.” The message is so pervasive, in fact, that every meeting in the company starts with a short discussion about safety, no matter what the main agenda holds. “It’s the first thing we always talk about,” Davis says. “We keep it in the forefront all the time.”
Also essential, Mayer says, is employee buy-in. And that was a little harder to accomplish, especially in the beginning, when some workers viewed the safety program as an imposition. But as the company’s accident rate fell little by little, as incentives began accumulating, and as fewer and fewer workers saw their peers getting hurt, the whole concept caught on. Today, CMC Metal Recycling-East is among the safest companies in the business—and it’s rightfully proud of that record.
“The program has everybody looking out for each other,” Mayer says. “If you’ve got 100 people, and those 100 people are fully participating, it’s going to be a whole lot more successful than if you’ve got a safety manager out there trying to police things by himself.”
Kim Fernandez is a writer based in Bethesda, Md .•
A model safety program has led CMC Metal Recycling-East to more than 2 million work hours without a lost-time accident.