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Safety Action Plans take Center Stage
Senior Safety Team's Focus: Exposure to Risks
All PotashCorp plant managers and the members of the company's Senior Safety Leadership Team kicked off the 2007 Best Practices Workshop in Toledo, Ohio on June 4 with an afternoon dedicated solely to safety.
John Hunt
Vice President of Safety,
Health and Environment
In an attempt to reduce or eliminate exposure to risks, ongoing work in safety has evolved beyond just safety statistics, said John Hunt, Vice President of Safety, Health and Environment. "The work now is to determine what is the root cause and then eliminate the risk."
"With Safety Action Plans now in place at all facilities, it's time to fine-tune them. To that end, the Senior Safety Leadership Team has made a great deal of progress, from talking about more specific safety issues to providing guidance, strategy, focus and leadership for the overall safety process," Hunt said. "This is all part of our goal of reducing exposures, which will enable us to achieve an injury-free culture."
"The sites have come a long way in a short time," said Hunt. "And once you have success in reducing exposure and eliminating risks, safety statistics improve as well."
Safety Statistics
Although 2006 safety results were a mixed bag, Hunt said, they did show improvement in recordable injury rates from 2005.
In 2006, the recordable injury rate was the lowest in PotashCorp history, but offsetting it was a lost-time injury rate higher than the year before.
While the 2006 recordable injury rate of 1.79 per 200,000 work hours was an all-time low rate, it nevertheless failed to achieve PotashCorp's goal of a 40-percent reduction in recordable injuries. The reduction was only 24 percent.
So far in 2007, the lost-time injury rate is tracking lower than in 2006.
Proof That Communication Is Key
Use of Employee Survey Data Effects Positive Change in Joplin
PotashCorp's Joplin, Missouri feed phosphate facility used the negative feedback in its 2005 employee surveys to bring about positive changes that were clearly measurable the next time all employees were surveyed.
Following a January 2005 reduction in Joplin's workforce, a growing disconnect between front-line supervisors and employees hindered communications. The site's Organizational Culture Diagnostic Inventory (OCDI) brought this issue to management's attention and pointed out the need for improvement.
"We saw that the change in staffing in 2005 was the crux of the problem," said Paul Shoup, Plant Manager. Solving the problem was going to require several measures.
"First we implemented a plant improvement suggestion program to ensure that employees' ideas and concerns did not go unrecognized. Next, we began including front-line supervisors in plant manager staff meetings. We instituted a 360-degree leadership process in which plant management and employees all provide feedback on supervisor job performance. And finally, we provided each front-line supervisor with an individual improvement action plan for 2007."
The results were dramatic. On the 2005 OCDI survey, the highest performance measure scored in the 70th percentile, with two measures falling below the 25th percentile. In 2007, every performance measure ranked in the 90th percentile.
"This was better improvement that we'd even expected," Shoup said. "We are pretty sure that we have closed the disconnect and are making improvements in our culture."
Understanding of Employee Concerns Leads to Improved Dialogue on Allan Safety Issues
A better understanding of what was keeping employees from becoming fully engaged in the safety process at the Allan, Saskatchewan potash facility has gone a long way to improving management-employee dialogue about safety concerns there.
An Organizational Culture Diagnostic Inventory (OCDI) survey done in 2004 indicated an employee belief that management was not fully supportive of safety improvements and that employees were often blamed for safety incidents.
"Active employee participation in our safety program is critical," said Stewart Brown, Allan General Manager. "Lack of participation in the past led to an adversarial relationship instead of a co-operative relationship with all parties working together for ongoing safety improvement. We needed to change that in order to reduce accidents and achieve better safety results."
The challenge at Allan was to convince employees that the behavioral-based safety process in place at most of PotashCorp's facilities was going to benefit the safety and welfare of everyone working on site.
To that end, efforts were made early in 2006 to address complacency and be more pro-active at addressing safety concerns. The number of positive safety role models increased with over 50 hourly employees involved as safety observers. The goal of an "injury-free workplace" was promoted by management and supervisors were expected to lead by example using relevant daily safety contacts to improve compliance with established procedures.
The change in attitude brought about an improvement in OCDI scores when the survey was re-done in late 2006. "In OCDI focus groups workers reported that they were able to bring safety concerns to their supervisors without fear of reprisal," Brown said. "In addition, more confidence was shown in how the senior management team valued safety."
"Nevertheless," he added, "employees said we still had work to do so, in our current Safety Action Plan, we are taking steps to improve our process of giving feedback to employees when safety concerns are brought up and we will be holding regular meetings with employees to discuss safety issues."
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