That’s good news to Koons, who says he worries that incentives based on department or division performance can pressure individuals to keep quiet about injuries and keep working when they’re hurt. He supports programs with both group and individual aspects, and ones that focus on reduction of injuries rather than ones that only reward when there are no injuries reported.
In another approach, both Universal Forest Products and Millard Lumber include safety compliance in annual employee evaluations and factor it into raises. “Until you take that step, they don’t buy in,” Millard Lumber’s Anderson says. “It’s most important with supervisory personnel because they’re responsible for maintaining safety in the work environment.”
Help Is Available While large dealers often have full-time safety directors, many NLBMDA members are small businesses without the budget to staff that position. As a result, the responsibility usually falls to the owner or to a yard manager, who has a host of other equally critical issues to address on a daily basis. As a single-operation dealer, for example, Taylor doesn’t have the staff or financial resources of a larger company for training or incentives. Fortunately plenty of help is available from insurers’ loss prevention departments, National Safety Council offices, NLBMDA, OSHA, and safety consultants like Koons.
Taylor has a great partnership with Young from Meadowbrook/TPA Associates. Young visits the yard on a regular basis, giving Taylor a fresh pair of eyes to spot items he might have missed. “She’ll notice things that need cleaned up, and ask [things like] when I got the fire extinguishers checked,” Taylor says. “She identifies the problem areas to keep them from becoming big problems. I don’t want to let her down; she works so hard for us.”
Taylor says three things helped him build his safety program, even without a big budget or human resources staff. First, it’s a small enough company to have great communication. The three managers who oversee the staff educate employees as soon as they see an unsafe condition and let them know there are consequences for not following company safety policies.
Second is employee empowerment. Each person on the staff knows that he or she can report a problem with a piece of equipment or a procedure that needs attention. That leads to the third key—management commitment. “I think employees take safety to heart when they see management pay attention,” Taylor says. “If our drivers report a problem with a piece of equipment, we don’t wait. We get it fixed right away.”
That type of immediate response is critical to any safety program, no matter how many employees a dealer has. Every yard has conditions that can become hazardous in a hurry, and in a great safety program everyone is watching out for problems and addressing them before someone gets hurt. The benefit is a reduction of both the direct costs of a workers’ comp claim, such as medical bills and lost wages, and reduction of a host of indirect costs, such as lost productivity, training costs for replacement staff, and the possibility of lawsuits and legal fees.
“It’s like an iceberg,” Anderson says. “You see such a small piece of it. If you multiply the little incidences, eventually you end up with a big one. The key is to never have a big one and minimize the little ones.” —Pat Curry is a contributing editor for PROSALES.
Safety Values If you’re trying to improve or establish a new safety program, a good place to start is the “Eight Principles of a Safe Workplace” from the National Association of Safety Professionals:
Lights! Camera! Safety! New NLBMDA safety video will focus on deliveries.
