Canadian CEOs detail rewards of health and safety initiatives
Beyond the obvious benefits that come from health and safety initiatives, some organizations are recognizing opportunities to improve their competitive advantage. The Conference Board of Canada conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 11 CEOs in which they reveal what health and safety means to them, the personal actions they have taken in their organization and the resulting benefits.
These individuals have transformed health and safety not only to make their organization healthier and safer, but also more prosperous. Here are excerpts from two of the interviews.
Elyse Allan
President and CEO
GE Canada
The Mississauga, Ont.-based company has five businesses in the infrastructure, finance and media industries, with about 9,000 employees across Canada.
How have your efforts in health and safety given your organization a competitive advantage? We have become certified with the Alberta Star program and that has given us a competitive advantage with some customers in that province, along with reductions in workers’ compensation premiums.
A number of big customers are starting to ask for our health and safety performance as a condition before signing contracts. So when asked, we have a great record to show them. Generally, as the costs of injury go up for everybody, nobody wants to bear those costs. There is now more recognition there is a cost to doing business associated with poor safety performance.
What single action have you personally taken that has made the greatest difference? Even though I am not the functional head of safety, I speak about health and safety often and take a visible leadership role. Along with encouraging our managers to walk the floor, I make safety the first agenda item and talk about the elements of a sustainable safety culture when I visit any of our locations. I encourage everyone to ask the relevant questions whenever they have the opportunity.
When somebody starts a meeting without talking about safety, I will be the person to stand up and raise the question. I make sure health and safety are part of the job of the business managers and part of their value proposition to the marketplace, which includes delivering a quality product and developing and building the product in the right way.
What challenges have you experienced and how did you overcome them? The greatest challenge is the combination of our broad product line with a fairly large employee population of about 10,000 employees that is widely disbursed over 260 sites, not counting customers’ locations. To overcome this challenge, we put a lot of effort into training and we are doing this in very creative ways. First, we teach employees how to do their jobs properly. Then, we make sure we engage them in building and sustaining a health and safety culture in their workplaces — wherever that may be.
Most of the training is online and required. Managers can track employee progress. They are notified when somebody has not yet completed their training, and they can follow up. Of course, we also have on-the-job training. We leverage technology to reach employees, to report incidents, to report against our monthly performance metrics and to comment on health and safety action items. It is a consistent global system that is visible to all managers and officers throughout the corporation.
Roy Slack
Director and president
Cementation Canada
The mine contracting and engineering company, owned by Murray & Roberts, is based in North Bay, Ont., and has 1,200 employees.
How have your efforts in health and safety given your organization a competitive advantage? We strive to be an employer of choice through excellence in safety. We see a direct link between our attractiveness as an employer and our ability to work safely and have a strong safety culture. Part of the solution to the challenge of attracting good people in this business is having a safety culture that will attract good people to work for you. We don’t measure the benefit in dollars. It is simply the right way to work.
What single action have you personally taken that has made the greatest difference to achieving this goal? We asked (our workers) what’s working and what’s not and we got some very interesting feedback. Based on their contributions, we were able to change a few things.
This year we really stressed reporting everything and some of the feedback we received showed that, despite whatever culture I establish or senior management establishes, it is ultimately the site superintendent and site management who establish the culture on the site. We see that very clearly where some projects report virtually everything — every incident, from the smallest thing — whereas other projects are still not reporting some things. And, of course, the employees find out early if somebody reports something and then gets chewed out for it. And then they stop reporting.
We want the culture of the company to be conducive to reporting and we are not where we want to be yet. What’s important is to recognize reporting and not to discipline. There is almost a requirement to report. If the guys know they have to report something at the end of the day, they keep their eyes open.
What challenges have you experienced and how did you overcome them? There are always challenges there — for example, differences of opinion between people. When you have employees voicing their concerns, supervisors may sometimes see these concerns as mere excuses. But whatever they are, you still have to commit to reacting to your employees’ recommendations. It doesn’t mean you have to implement them but you do have to continue to communicate with people, especially if you decide not to implement their recommendations.
If you had one piece of advice to share with your peers, what would it be? If you are in a position of CEO or president at the top of an organization, the greatest impact you can have is on the culture. You can’t be at the job every day; you can’t be on every job site of every project. Establishing a culture — through the vision statement and sincerely believing in it — that supports this is my job and you look for senior people who have similar values and share your belief in this vision. We firmly believe the fewer incidents and injuries, the better our performance. Our projects have proven that time and again. Our best projects are the ones with the best safety records.
Bjorn Rutten is a senior research associate with the Conference Board of Canada and author of In Their Own Words: Building Competitive Advantage Through Health and Safety (available at www.ceosafety.org/Libraries/Newletters/08-354-In_Their_Own_Words-Compendium-WEB.sflb). For more information, visit www.conferenceboard.ca.
