Sink manufacturer lands prestigious safety award
In 2005, Midland, Ont.-based sink manufacturer Franke Kindred found itself on one of the provincial labour ministry’s least desirable lists: the High Risk Initiative list of 30,000 companies with above-average injury rates and a poor track record for getting hurt workers back on the job.
“It was an eye opener as a company,” says environmental health and safety supervisor Wesley Zoschke.
The company launched an aggressive return to work and safety program for its 180 employees, which included hiring an environmental health and safety supervisor for the first time.
“As soon as you do something good, everyone claims credit for it,” says Zoschke. “But ours is not that special. All we did is take the outline from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and follow it.”
Four years later, Franke Kindred earned the elite Industrial Accident Prevention Association’s Level III Health and Safety Achievement Award. Only 17 Canadian companies have received this honour. The company also saw injury rates fall from 38 injuries per year requiring medical care in 2006 to just eight in 2009. At the same time, absentee rates decreased from seven per cent to 1.5 per cent.
More significantly, workers earned a new distinction by the end of 2009: two million hours worked without a lost-time injury.
“That’s great for us because we never had anything over 600,000 before,” says Zoschke. “So, we’re really pushing along and the program is really working.”
He credits a simple, hands-on, ear-to-the-ground approach.
“People complain about the little things and sometimes supervisors ignore them,” he explains. “But you fix those things — like a broken knob or a mat that is worn out in one spot — then they come to you with a ton of information. They start coming to you with the medium and bigger things.”
The program also involved being on the floor daily, whether it was talking to workers and supervisors or conducting a safety walk. Those inspections used to happen once a month in one area only. Today the joint health and safety committee still does a safety walk monthly, but every member is assigned a different area on a rotating basis. There are also senior management audits twice a year.
Franke Kindred has a tiered system with 12 sections that are scored weekly. If Zoschke finds at least five items that are not supposed to be in a particular area, the section is given a zero. The same goes for finding five safety hazards, and so on.
“Part of the key to the program is that we hold everyone responsible for safety equally,” he says. “So, if an employee isn’t wearing his PPE (personal protective equipment) and he gets cut, he gets written up. If the supervisor is handling the stuff and gets cut, that person gets written up as well. There’s no double standard.”
When it comes to getting injured workers back to work, Franke Kindred takes a proactive approach: finding out what the employee can do and giving that person the tools and assistance to return.
“The old mentality is, ‘I’m hurt. Doctor says take two weeks off. Go home.’ People say ‘I can’t work,’” explains Zoschke. “We take a typical functionability form, look at the restrictions and we fit the people to the jobs that we have with those restrictions.”
So, for example, a worker who sprains his back and may not be able to do a lifting job is assigned to watching the line. This works because the plant is set up in a multi-job system to begin with, where employees rotate jobs every two hours within a cell.
Implementing a more rigorous program was “tough at the beginning,” according to Zoschke, but having a strong, supportive management team backing it made a difference.
“It was really pushed from our president and vice-president. If we had problems with supervisors or employees, he would call them together and say, ‘No, it needs to be done and that’s it,’” says Zoschke. “You get that kind of response – and people see it – and you get a lot of buy-in from everybody.”
A healthy incentive plan has also helped. Franke Kindred has awarded barbecues to workers for achieving one year without a lost-time injury. Last year, the president bought everyone a watch for hitting the two-million hour mark.
At the same time, the company has been more vigilant about disciplining workers and supervisors who aren’t following safety procedures. It also more closely scrutinizes the root causes of accidents and injuries and Franke Kindred has developed in-house training.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly, it knows that health and safety happens out on the floor.
“No one can run safety from an office,” he says. “You get out there and do the little things for them and make it so (safety) takes care of itself.”
