Engaging Employees to Boost Workplace Safety
Successfully engaging employees to improve workplace health and safety.
Incidents of recordable lost time injuries (LTI) negatively impact employees’ health, wellness and overall perception of the Company that they work for and create added expenditure for the business. To prevent incidents from occurring, in 2018 our U.S.-based facilities launched a campaign to reinvigorate the emphasis placed on risk assessments, preventative measures and employee engagement.
- Enacting leadership position changes
- Implementing a quality system methodology
- Conducting external safety audits that replicated formal Occupational Safety and Health Administration audits
- Creating a safety committee supported by subcommittee assignments that correlated with the external audits
- Including safety considerations within daily operational decision-making
Beyond involvement on the safety committee and subcommittees, employees contributed suggestions for safety slogans as well as solutions to identified safety risks. Additionally, annual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were identified, and an incentive program was rolled out across union and nonunionized facilities.
As a result, in fiscal year 2022, our Alliance One Specialty Products (AOSP) facility, located in Wilson, North Carolina, surpassed 1,500 consecutive days of zero lost time due to injuries. AOSP’s efforts to engage employees and promote workplace safety contribute to our environmental, social and governance (ESG) goal of maintaining an LTI rate of <0.5 per 100 employees per 200,000 hours worked.
