Here are some safety leader ideas from Lenessa Bannister, VP of Lennox Stores at Lennox International. I took the notes for you:
- Strike a balance of communication. Don't have too much information nor too little. Our corporate team has a Safety Engineer while we brought in resources to prove we deeply care about safety.
- The Safety Mindset succeeds when communication and consistency are cornerstones of our approach. You will never be perfect. Even at a time of ZERO recordable, maintain your safety culture.
- Best ways to communicate safety programs surround campaigns, use characters, and has to be in short bits to respect the time of the employees. 10 to 12 minute increments. Entire team has to be consistent with the message. Each zone personalize it with the needs of the team.
- Mobile communication helps with a distributed workforce. Walk throughs, safety training, video walk-throughs when auditing our safety protocol - even during a pandemic.
- Events help with communication initiatives. Specific to Power Lift we had them sign the poster and take pictures of them signing it. Shared a collaborative video that "We are committed to safety."
- It's important for Leadership to engage and give a face to involvement. Lennox does a tiered approach where everyone completes training. Involvement is posted and leaders show they stand with everyone else to go through training. Leaders are asked to bring up the safety training on their team meetings and team calls.
- All recordables lead to constant improvement.
- We have a peer to peer recording structure to ensure everyone feels safe to share without punishment from a higher-up. This increases the transparency. No one will be penalized for recording an incident.
- We call it a "Priority" not an "Initiative." We find this helps our safety numbers and even helps our bottom line. A single injury in a two person store, we know that productivity goes down when there is an increase load on the other person
- Customer service is consistently getting better with reduced recordables.
- Our work won't be done even when we get to zero.
- Making Safety Training interesting, we do competitions. Part of their role is sales we make sure it is a fun competition. Training is rolled into the point they get. Still has to be delivered in short bits. If there is an hour content module, then we split that into four short bits.
- To keep safety a priority, it's human nature, we want to be part of a celebration.
- We develop a playbook for safety initiatives, process change, recognition, ideas for our systems to stay strong.
Talk About It. Live it. Celebrate it.