On March 10, 2023, our organization reached a very important milestone. It marked 365 days – one full year since our last recordable safety incident. This means our MIR / TRIF fell to zero.
We are also celebrating an important psychological milestone in that during the year we safely worked 1,055,000 hours, demonstrating that we can complete work for our clients in any season and in any work environment (office, lab, and field), while ensuring there is “Safety in Everything We Do”.
Our team members deserve recognition for their major contributions to making this a reality. Individually, their every “action” helps create a safe and healthy environment - every hour, every day, every week, every month. Together these actions have a positive impact on all of us.
Over the year we have been modernizing our organization’s Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS). Due to our growth, increased scope of work, and client requirements we needed to update key elements of our system. Many improvements will take time to be fully implemented.
Our immediate key area of focus was on health and safety communication across the organization. We simplified leading and lagging indicator reporting, and most impactfully launched a weekly company-wide health and safety email message aligned with the event, situation or activity facing our team members at that time.
These weekly email messages have “gone viral”, organically making their way into our morning huddles, toolbox talks, and client meetings. Topics focus on key areas of our business and provide a connection to “Safety is Personal” (Allnorth’s Focused Health and Safety Alignment 2022) both at work and at home.
Team members’ responses to the weekly safety messages have been heartwarming and inspiring. Here are a couple of examples:
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On the topic of dehydration: “Just wanted to share what I experienced last week. I had to bring my husband into the ER because he started to go into shock (hands cramping, legs cramping, nausea, confusion, and could hardly walk). We were really confused/scared about why he was feeling this way because he was pounding water like mad (dehydration didn’t even come to mind). It wasn’t until he was hooked up to the IV that he started to feel better.” On the topic of lightning: "I'm glad I live on the coast where we don’t often get thunder and lightning storms. They freak me out! Thanks for the info – I appreciate all your updates even when they don’t apply to me.” |
As Allnorth’s Corporate Safety Lead, our team members’ feedback touches me personally because it shows that consistently communicating “bite size” health and safety messages has an impact. My weekly safety messages are the “actions” I take to support our organization in being a safe and healthy place for our team members to excel at work.
If practiced consistently, these actions can improve our chances of achieving other milestones in health and safety, in other operational areas, and in team members’ personal lives.
As we continue to enhance our OHSMS and support our team members and clients in providing healthy and safe working environments on all scales, I know this team is up to the challenge of embracing change. It is exciting to see the direct contributions we are making to not only our personal health and safety but to the health and safety of others.
The work continues, but we have proven to ourselves that “Safety in Everything We Do” is part of our DNA. Thank you Allnorth team members for your safety “actions” that have gone into achieving these two significant milestones.
Your Partner in Health and Safety,
Jonathan