In 2016, a manufacturing company hired Jonathan Henson, CMIOSH, to lead their Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) program. The manufacturing company had over 1600 employees based in five manufacturing plants across the US, UK, Mexico, and China. The company also had five service centers in the US. The safety director role allowed Jonathan to bring 25 years EHS experience, extensive training, and education to the company. A change in the safety culture was required to move the company forward and stop hurting employees while growing the safety culture.
Jonathan Henson, Global Health and Safety Leader
“The first thing I did was to execute an EHS policy. The company had no EHS policy or procedures when I joined the company,” said Henson. Within the first two months, Johnathan had installed the first company EHS policy. “Specifically, this meant that if an employee felt the job was unsafe, there was no explicit process allowing them to stop the job. The EHS policy granted all employees the permission to stop the job.” Managers and employees were asked to celebrate when an employee stopped the job.
After 60 days, the company president and board were presented a top 10 list of EHS projects to complete. The first item was the EHS policy. After one year, all but one of the top 10 were completed. The item not completed (safety culture survey) was delayed due to a parent company survey completed in 2017. Jonathan grew EHS presence by executing procedures and policies from investigations to Management of Change. After one year, the recordables were reduced to 17. There were 17 too many recordables in 2017 but none were similar, and investigations were very thorough.
“I was proud to be the project manager for a new, custom built Behavior Based Safety platform that helped grow a sustainable safety culture and focus on leading indicators. The DPC TRIR rate decreased from 2.34 in 2016 to .52 in 2019. I was also pleased that the based BBS system I led had nearly 100% participation in June 2020 after less than four years.”
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