Building a culture of safety is clearly a priority at Acme Corrugated Box. Safety Manager Tom Wertman characterized it as a “passion for safety,” saying, “It’s our number one fundamental at Acme.”
A critical part of our business operation philosophy centers around actively finding a variety of ways to encourage employees to watch out for teammates and avoid taking shortcuts that might compromise safety for one and all.
Acme vigilantly follows Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) guidelines. These measure our safety performance via a number of factors organized into those activated after a safety issue (lagging indicators) and preventative measures to head off incidents (leading indicators).
While these OSHA practices are a key measure to maintain a safe workplace; Acme goes above and beyond through our participation in SafeStart, a behavior-based look at safety with an emphasis on finding out the ‘why’ of how accidents might occur, then leveraging employee participation to head them off. According to Wertman, “When employees take an active role and ownership in safety, the entire workplace benefits.”
Acme believes that beyond compliance initiatives, a company-wide safety culture advances most effectively with positive support. Our ‘Doing it Right!’ initiative recognizes employees who go above and beyond to follow safety procedures correctly. This attitude about safety is also incorporated into regular work practices, such as our monthly update meetings, where they begin the meeting by sharing safety-related stories and talking about lessons that can be learned from them.
Acme makes sure that safety education remains an ongoing part of their culture. Supervisors share a weekly safety discussion topic that is then maintained in our library. One such ‘safety huddle’ addressed preventive measures discussed during a recent heat wave. Wertman says, “Safety communications must be fresh, innovative and participatory in order to be effective. Sometimes safety rules can appear inconvenient, and to help thwart that, weekly discussions keep them out front, simple and honest.”
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