Safety Observation and Feedback

By Terry E. McSween, founder and CEO, Quality Safety Edge

Last year I had the opportunity to speak with a group of 35 construction and maintenance contractors that were involved in active behavior-based safety (BBS) peer observation processes. I was invited to speak on the topic of improving peer safety observations.

The participants were mostly safety managers from their respective companies with a small number of other managers who worked in the field and had shared responsibility for safety. Also, this was not a random group drawn from the universe of organizations using BBS. They elected to come to a session that was billed as discussing common problems with BBS, so I assumed it was a group representing companies whose BBS programs were struggling with at least some aspects of the BBS process. I was not connected to the participating organizations in any way. I had not met them before nor had QSE worked with any of them. As a result, I had very little background concerning their organizations with which to frame our discussion. Luckily, we have begun using an audience response system that allows us tocollect data and receive feedback from our audience, so I decided to solicit some information from the audience on their specific problems with BBS observations.

Step-by-Step Safety at Embraco Slovakia

A thriving factory with 2200 employees (approximately 1900 of those employees on the production floor) manufacturing high-quality products for customers around the world—this is the Embraco Slovakia plant. Embraco Slovakia is a subsidiary of Embraco—one of the largest worldwide producers of compressors and condensing units for refrigeration. In 2011 this facility in the small town of Spisska’ Nova’ Ves produced an estimated 4 million compressors, including a specialty line exclusively made at this location.

In 1998, the Thunder Creek Gas Services, LLC Company was established with just over a handful of employees as a joint venture to build a gathering and transportation system for natural gas in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Since that time, the enterprise has grown into a successful organization of currently almost 40 employees with locations in Gillette and Douglas, Wyoming, and Denver, Colorado.

Incidents can happen even in safe workplaces, because human behavior is unpredictable. That was certainly the case when a warehouse employee of the Suwanee, Georgia, location of Embraco North America (ENA), a sales, R&D, and distribution center for Embraco—a world leader in the manufacture of refrigeration compressors—was unlucky enough to be involved in a frightening situation. “We had an employee who was wrapping a pallet.