“For every challenge there is an opportunity” – this statement from keynote speaker, General Honoré, summarized the last 18 months of the pandemic, as well as the EHS Today Safety Leadership Conference as a whole. In fact, the Origami Risk session with Compass Group highlighted that very message: learning from the pandemic, technology adoption can help you adapt to future challenges and make your culture more proactive. 

Another theme, also heard at the Summer 2021 OSHA summit, was hazard identification and proactive safety management. One session that highlighted hazard identification was Filling in the Blanks: A New Toolset To Help Spot The Hazards We Could Be Missing presented by Center of Visual Expertise (COVE) and Nestle. Session speakers revealed that COVE trained Nestle employees and leadership using a framework to identify hazards they normally wouldn’t see with the following process:

• Hazard: What do you see?
• Risk Assessment: What does it mean?
• Action: What did you do about it?

This training gave Nestle employees permission to identify potential hazards they were concerned about -- thereby implementing a more proactive culture of safety. This also helped in reinforcing the importance of employee feedback and providing concrete evidence that employee concerns are being addressed.

It’s important to note that one-time training is not the best approach. Knowing this, the team at Nestle built this framework into both the onboarding and annual training. As a result, they have gone about six months since the inception of the program without a recordable injury.

Another way companies have dealt with encouraging a safety program is by making it fun. For example, Yaskawa uses gamification – including awards and prizes to report safety issues.

Of course, open communication is also key – from the leadership level down to the front line workers. Yaskawa set up a safety site in order to communicate with their employees on safety policies and other training tools. But that media alone is not enough: Yaskawa uses three different types of media to deliver safety messages six times per year. At Amazon, Pam Bobbit, Sr. Manager Information Systems, told the audience “you need to tell employees why it matters to them – what is the ‘so what.’” On the manufacturing line for example, that means decreasing downtime.

At Origami, we have heard stories from our clients about ways they reduce incidents and injuries – from safety initiatives like process safety management to safety meetings. To learn more about how Origami can help you be more proactive in hazard identification and generate a more proactive safety culture, contact us.