March/April 2005
Plant supervisors at The David J. Joseph Co. must attend an in-house safety training school as well as ongoing conferences, a two-pronged approach that has helped the company achieve safety success.
By Scott McAlpine
Many scrap companies employ full-time professional safety managers to plan and coordinate their safety efforts. No problem with that. But the truth is that plant supervisors are the ones who make safety happen on the day-to-day operational level.
It makes sense, then, that the better your plant supervisors know safety management techniques, the better they can lead their crews to a good safety record. Of course, such supervisors aren’t born knowing about safety management. You have to train them—and that’s exactly what we do with the 100 or so operational supervisors in The David J. Joseph Co. (DJJ) (Cincinnati).
Our supervisors fill many roles, including process manager, psychologist, cheerleader, and customer relations maestro. In addition, they must perform the following safety-related duties:
• Organize and present safety meetings for work crews;
• Teach safe work practices to new employees—and enforce the rules;
• Inspect their plants for obvious safety hazards—such as missing guards and worn cords—and correct them;
• Anticipate not-so-obvious safety hazards and correct them as well;
• Respond to accidents and emergencies as appropriate;
• Participate in accident/incident investigations; and
• Inspire subordinates to not only work safely but also participate actively in making the workplace safe.
Because scrap plant supervisors—especially experienced ones—can demonstrate mastery and resourcefulness in their many roles, you may not think to question their knowledge of safe work principles. But that could be a dangerous assumption since even veteran supervisors may not understand the basics of a scrap plant safety program.
Here are three reasons why supervisor safety training is important:
1. Supervisors have different responsibilities than other plant employees, and they need specific information and skills to perform expected duties properly. Notably, much of this information is not included in the OSHA-mandated annual training we give to our general population of employees.
2. The scrap processing workplace is unique. For instance, even a person with years of experience supervising safety in another industry wouldn’t know the safe approach distance to a mobile shear or how to respond to a radiation alarm at the scale.
3. Regulations, technology, and best safety practices all change constantly. Thus, even well-schooled supervisors need periodic retraining to stay current.
Motivated by these and other reasons, The David J. Joseph Co. developed a supervisor safety training strategy that provides initial and ongoing training. The initial training takes place at what we call DJJ Safety School. For ongoing training, we hold supervisor safety and environmental conferences. Here’s a look at both of these training efforts.
Initial Training—DJJ Safety School
Whenever we hire a new supervisor or reassign/promote a current employee to duties involving direct supervision of plant workers, that person must receive safety training.
DJJ Safety School classes are held every six months at our headquarters in Cincinnati. These classes provide three days of instruction in critical safety and environmental skill areas (see “Learning About Safety” at right for a list of topics covered).
Class size ranges from six to 12 new supervisors. We’ve found that small groups allow for more interaction and participation, which enables attendees to get more out of the experience. Two DJJ safety staff serve as the principal instructors, supplemented by three or four other presenters.
Before DJJ Safety School, we tried giving supervisors OSHA 10-hour and 30-hour general industry outreach training. That approach resulted in a generic training experience that excluded many points our supervisors needed to know. While our current DJJ Safety School format still qualifies each attendee for an OSHA 10-hour card, it also covers scrap-specific topics such as operating a radiation detector, holding effective safety meetings, conducting thorough accident investigations, and other subjects that fall outside OSHA’s scope of training.
To ensure the usefulness and success of DJJ Safety School, we developed it with the following principles in mind:
• Classes are intensive and demanding. As a result, participants gain respect for the safety process and feel a sense of pride in completing the school.
• Material presented is specific to our industry—and our company, with a focus on DJJ safety policy requirements and sharing experiences from our own plants. In this way, attendees can relate to the information that’s taught and make use of it.
• We include as many hands-on exercises as possible since we believe that participants learn best by doing. For example, in addition to hearing how to plan and effectively present a safety meeting topic, teams of attendees must actually prepare a topic and present it to the class.
• To balance the classroom instruction, we break out to review some topics at our nearby Newport, Ky., scrap processing facility. These on-site sessions relieve tedium for attendees and allow the demonstration and observation of safety techniques in a way that isn’t possible in the classroom.
• All attendees must take a final exam at the end of training. This exam prompts attendees to pay attention and take the material seriously. In the weeks following the training, DJJ corporate safety managers follow up one-on-one with each attendee to review final exam answers and clear up any points of confusion.
In the end, this initial training gives our supervisors the basic toolkit of skills they need to perform safety- and environment-related supervisory duties at our plants.
Ongoing Training—Supervisor Safety and Environmental Conferences
Every 16 months or so, we gather plant supervisors from across the company for training events at one of our plants. These conferences last two days and are primarily focused on building and refreshing skills the supervisors learned in DJJ Safety School. Given that DJJ has about 100 plant supervisors in all, we’ve found it practical to hold two conferences, usually a month apart, to allow all to attend on a staggered basis. Again, time is split between activities in the classroom and time in the plant.
A typical supervisor conference covers many of the same topics as DJJ Safety School, but our presentation is different because our focus is on refining the supervisors’ skills rather than teaching the basics. For example, accident investigation is one topic that’s taught at DJJ Safety School, where we cover the subject in step-by-step fashion. First, we explain why it’s important to investigate accidents, then we describe the process of gathering evidence, identifying root causes, and taking corrective actions. To complete the training, we stage an accident and have participants work through the investigation process. This establishes baseline competence.
At a supervisor conference, our attendees are experienced plant managers who may have performed dozens of accident investigations. To enhance their skills, the instructors role-play an investigation fraught with bad techniques and ask the class to point them out. This approach refreshes existing abilities, sharpens awareness of proper techniques, and is much more engaging and challenging for the audience than a dry repeat of previous material.
The conference is also an ideal forum for discussing new corporate safety policies, putting our company’s accident data into perspective, and sharing techniques for safe operation. We include discussion time to encourage ideas and feedback from the group regarding proposed policy changes, to share best practices for safe operation, and to hash out problems with safety administration. This feedback enables us to create policies and procedures that fit DJJ’s diverse operations, and it helps ensure buy-in from the supervisors who will enforce those rules.
Recognizing that networking is another important part of the supervisor conferences, we build in social time and activities that help participants get to know their peers from sister plants. Our networking activities have included the following:
Problem-Solving Competition. As a morning warmup activity, employees are divided into teams that compete to solve a problem. In one challenge, each team tries to build the tallest tower from the same number of building blocks in the fastest time. This kind of exercise demonstrates the value of teamwork and communication skills while enabling supervisors from different locations to get to know each other.
Evening ‘Fun Time.’ All work and no play can make for a boring and tiresome conference, so we make sure to work a little fun into the event. Evening events have included attending baseball and hockey games, dinner cruises, and poker parties. Such activities provide a purely social setting for participants to relax with their peers while making the safety-training experience more enjoyable than the customary “bare bones” approach.
Playing a Game. At the end of each conference, we split the supervisors into teams and play Safety Quiz Bowl or Scrap Family Feud. Teams answer safety- and environment-related questions, displaying their expanded knowledge and competing for prizes like T-shirts, personal first-aid kits, and—most importantly—bragging rights.
As our initial DJJ Safety School and ongoing supervisor conferences illustrate, supervisor safety training is a key element of The David J. Joseph Co.’s overall safety effort. This two-pronged approach has been effective in many ways. For one, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our plant supervisors as well as the plant managers to whom they report. Most significantly, our overall accident frequency and severity indices continue to decline—due, in large part, to our well-trained plant supervisors. Though we’re proud of our current safety training program, we continually work to improve our approach, always striving for that ultimate goal of a perfect safety record.
Learning About Safety
Here’s a list of topics The David J. Joseph Co. covers in its DJJ Safety School for new plant supervisors, with a note on how much time is devoted to each topic during the three-day training program.
Intro to OSHA (two hours): History and mission of OSHA; locating and using OSHA standards; effect of OSHA standards on DJJ safety policies; identifying and correcting common OSHA violations; and conducting OSHA inspections.
Continuous Improvement Process (one hour): Intent and structure of DJJ’s safety and environmental continuous improvement process; measuring safety system success; factors underlying accident rates; team-based approach to eliminating safety deficiencies; and use of DJJ’s Deficiency Evaluation and Control System, a Web-accessed database tool into which safety “deficiencies” are entered so they can be tracked until fixed.
Radiation Safety (one hour): Nature and hazards of radiation; recognizing common radiation sources in scrap; using fixed and handheld radiation detectors; and radiation safety procedures.
Spill Control (15 minutes): Who needs a spill prevention, control, and countermeasure (SPCC) plan; features of an SPCC; spill response procedures; tank inspection requirements; and best practices to minimize spills.
Torchcutting (one hour): History of torching accidents; torch and compressed gas basics and safe practices; DJJ burner training requirements; and walkthrough of torching area.
Walking/Working Surfaces and Fall Protection (one hour): OSHA requirements for catwalks, ladders, platforms, and pits; common trip and fall hazards; safely mounting/dismounting mobile equipment; and requirements for and use of personal fall-arrest gear (including a demonstration).
Hazard Recognition Walkaround (45 minutes): Techniques for recognizing physical hazards in the plant; employee involvement in walkarounds; and common electrical, machine, chemical, and other hazards in the scrap processing environment.
Safety Supervision and New Employee Orientation (30 minutes): Safety-related responsibilities of plant supervisors; rules-enforcement practices; and tools and techniques for new employee safety orientation.
Fire and Egress (one hour): Historical background of workplace fires; requirements of OSHA egress and fire protection standards; fire extinguisher selection, placement, and inspection; and emergency action plans.
Effective Safety Meetings (one hour): Purpose and structure of plant safety meetings; trainer goals; and techniques for effective presentations (including an exercise in which attendees prepare and present a safety topic for class review).
Electrical Safety (one hour): The nature of electricity; how circuits work; grounding; effects of electricity on the human body; and common scrap plant electrical hazards and corrections.
Hazardous Materials (one hour): Review of OSHA hazardous materials standards; best practices for fuel handling and storage; and compressed gas issues and practices.
Accident Investigation (45 minutes): Review of DJJ accident experience; purpose and goals of accident/incident investigation; team-based accident investigation; and investigation techniques and accident followup.
Accident Recordkeeping (30 minutes): General OSHA recordkeeping requirements; determining recordability; and use of the DJJ accident log and OSHA 300 and 300A forms.
Hazard Communication (one hour): Description of policy requirements; reading a material safety data sheet; container labeling; and employee training requirements.
First Aid/Bloodborne Pathogens (30 minutes): Regulatory requirements and interpretations; plant first-aid supplies; first-aid training; bloodborne pathogens personal protective equipment; and recognizing and responding to exposure incidents.
Machine Guarding—Baler/Shear/Shredder Safety (one hour): Safety considerations for fixed equipment and hand power tools; general principles for machine guarding; specific hazards related to scrap balers, shears, and shredders; and review of accident experience.
Lockout/Tagout (one hour) : Review of accidents related to unexpected energy release; practices required to isolate energy sources during machine maintenance work; detailed review of DJJ’s lockout/tagout policy; and lockout/tagout devices.
Scott McAlpine is corporate safety manager for The David J. Joseph Co. (Cincinnati).
Plant supervisors at The David J. Joseph Co. must attend an in-house safety training school as well as ongoing conferences, a two-pronged approach that has helped the company achieve safety success.