Panel: Safety requires company culture, not just a committee

Columbus, Ohio — For Alec Pierce of Par4 Plastics, a safety specialist at the Marion, Ky.-based injection molder, the importance of a zero-tolerance policy hit home years ago.

A good friend and electrical worker with whom Pierce had played football in high school was high up on a power line in Paducah, Ky., when a small nick in one of his insulated gloves proved fatal.

Pierce's friend left behind a wife and two children.

"So this is something I really do take to heart," Pierce told a packed room as part of a May 25 panel at the 2023 Environmental, Health and Safety Summit sponsored by the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors and the Association for Rubber Products Manufacturers. "Being safe on the job site is about the best thing you can do day in and day out."

Many companies employ safety committees and their composition, best practices and lessons learned kicked off the second day of the EHS Summit at the AC Marriott Downtown Columbus.

Having a committee is one thing, but what matters is whether company safety includes a full buy-in on a culture of caution.

"They did not have a program when I arrived at Engineered Profiles years ago," said Kirk Bunner, safety manager at Engineered Profiles LLC. a plastics extruder based in Columbus. "So we started with internal audits ... and we went out to the manufacturing floor to make sure people understand the importance of safety and that people are committed to it."

Bunner and his initial team identified risks at Engineered Profiles — including machine guarding, a point of intense focus for OSHA — and wrote them up to be fixed.

And they are to be remedied—not on some amorphous timeline, but immediately.

"We are very candid in the debriefing room," Bunner said. "Sometimes the result is to shut it down and fix it. We know this affects every facet of business.

"In the end someone might say, 'Whoa, why are we shutting down the line?' Well, we are not waiting until the end of the shift or tomorrow. We are going to shut it down and fix it right away."

Being involved in safety is crucial to the safety culture for company associates, Bunner said.

"I am amazed sometimes when safety is not on the morning agenda. ... I see customer feedback, operations ... but not safety. And no piece of plastic is worth your safety—we have echoed that again and again. EP is now fixing its issues," he said.

An ingrained safety culture is influenced by behaviors, attitudes and opinions. And the organizational mission affects leadership strategies.

Underlying values and unquestioned assumptions can negatively impact the culture.

Caitlin Willis, safety and training coordinator at Polyflex Products Inc. based in Farmington Hills, Mich., said she lives safety "day-in and day-out" at the plastics design, prototyping, tooling and manufacturing firm.

"I have found a passion for this and try to pass that on," Willis said. "I have been passionate about the safety culture in our company."

When Charlie Christie of Eagle Elastomers, a rubber materials supplier based in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, went through his own harrowing experience with an amputation, he vowed to never again take workplace safety for granted.

"We had a horrific accident several years ago," said Christie, who served as moderator for the May 25 panel. "Thankfully, we had a worker who was attending night school to be a nurse, and he stepped in until EMTs arrived."

But rather than leave a critical moment to chance, the structure of the safety committee is a charge of the entire company, from the C-suite and owners to operators and engineers.

"It is an involvement from management on down," Pierce said. "We struggled a bit during COVID, but we have ramped [the safety committee] back up since then. It shows that safety is at the forefront for Par4 Plastics every day."

Pierce added that everyone in the company is encouraged to "speak up" if they see an issue.

"And I mean everyone ... from senior leadership to the guy who is in his first day on the job," he said.

Par4 Plastics has two to three people per shift who are trained in CPR and the use of company-supplied AEDs, Pierce said.

And continuing education via conferences like the EHS Summit can be invaluable.

"The tourniquet class was big," Pierce said of the session that concluded the summit's first day on May 24. "We are going to implement that as soon as we get back."

Willis said she adopts a non-confrontational stance at work, a key leadership skill for safety issues and dialogue.

"The end goal is safety ... and we are not the enemy," she said. "We want to make sure you get home to your families every day."

Pierce echoed this sentiment.

"Open communication is key," he said. "I feel like I am there for you, not there to boss you around. I'm there to help them get home at the end of the day."

Willis said a safety counter — a calendar that ticks off X-number of days "without a safety incident" — can be a morale booster on the manufacturing floor.

Such a counter also can be counterproductive in that it offers a "false sense of hope," Pierce said.

"An employee does not want to be the person to make the counter start over again, so they maybe do not report something," he said. "So it can be both good and bad. But I will say it does help employees feel like they are all part of this, all in this together."

The key, as panelists reiterated, is communication.

"We communicate issues and suggestions by word of mouth as well as through cards that people can fill out," Bunner said.

Pierce added that he gives employees his cell phone number to call "anytime, day or night."

"And if we can we fix the issue right then and there, we do it," he said.

Outside of major incidents, routine safety discussions center around work station improvements such as ergonomics; slips, trips and falls; and machine guarding, according to Willis.

"The focus needs to be on the training," Willis said. "There needs to be a buy-in by the employee as early as possible. Developing a culture of safety ... not only supports your employees but has proven to positively impact a company's bottom line."