Environmental Management, Inc. (EMI), based in Plain City, Ohio, recently created a safety champion program in an effort to increase their team’s engagement and focus on safety.
“It’s hard to have people be engaged with safety,” says Joe Payne, environmental health and safety associate director for EMI. “A lot of people were just like, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for 25 years,’ or they’re not interested because all they want to do is get it done. So, I feel like the program brings everybody into the safety first mindset.”
Payne says instead of just talking about safety when something happens, everyone’s now invested. EMI started the program last year. He says he got the idea from the Ohio Safety Congress. There was a company there that did something similar, and he decided to tweak it for EMI’s use.
How It Works
The Safety Champion program has monthly winners and then a grand safety champion that is voted on at the end of the year.
Field managers are responsible for nominating employees weekly from each branch’s maintenance and installation divisions. Payne says that a safety champion is someone who demonstrates safety excellence, works with others and communicates. Another aspect of a safety champion is a willingness to help strangers in need. He says one recent safety champion noticed an elderly lady fall outside of an urgent care facility and was bleeding badly. The employee immediately started to staunch the bleeding and called 911.
Josh Chalfant, associate director of training and development for EMI, says they’ve had other employees spot mulch fires on a property and put it out or notice a driver with a trailer is not utilizing a spotter and stopping them.
At the end of the month, these 24 nominees are shared with the leadership team, which rates each nomination based on the writeup. The employees with the highest rating from each department are named the monthly winners and each receives a $100 gift card and a certificate of safety excellence.
Monthly winners also get a picture holding a gold wrestling belt with Payne and they shoot off confetti cannons. Their picture gets posted at each of their shops so everyone can see who was the safety champion for the maintenance and installation departments.
“The confetti cannon is the icing on the cake,” Payne says. “It’s the best way to get safety in front of everyone versus Josh or me or some upper management guy coming up and going, ‘Hey, do this.’”
Payne says the nominations help the managers think about the positives of the team’s performance during the week.
“You have expectations, do your job, but as humanity, we all remember the negatives,” Payne says. “You didn’t do this that one day. So hopefully, the manager is thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, they did do this,’ and that sticks in his brain.”
At the end of the year, EMI has a big party in October, during which all the monthly winners have the chance to be voted the grand safety champion for each department. Payne says they play walkout songs for the monthly winners who might become the grand safety champion.
The grand safety champions receive $1,000 and a gaudy ring encased in glass with artificial turf with the year and ‘Grand Safety Champ’ inscribed on it.
“Last year at the party, the winner was wearing it and showed it to everybody,” Payne says.
Benefits of a Safety Champion Program
Payne says the employee response has been very positive to the program. He greets employees in the morning and asks them if they’re going to work like a champion today.
“I would say specifically with the Hispanic workers, they will walk around and say ‘campeón’, the word champion in Spanish is campeón, and wave to me,” Payne says.
Payne says that the program has encouraged a safety culture where employees are holding one another accountable with safe practices like buckling their seat belts and wearing their safety glasses.
Payne says their incident rates are down significantly, so they now have more money for wages and minor parties.
“Our recordables are down 20%,” Payne says. “Our industry, for example, in 2022 had a 3.4 recordable incident rate. We finished with 2.6.”
EMI’s damage costs are also down about 50%. Payne says the cost of their incidents are less expensive as well.
Payne says there haven’t been any real downsides to the program as he has to deal less with insurance companies or taking employees to urgent care. The upfront costs for the program were $200 for the wrestling belt and $200 for the monthly winners and $1,000 for the grand champion.
“If we’re saving five digits on property damage, and I have to pay four or five grand, that’s a no-brainer,” Payne says.
To generate interest in the program, Payne would dress up like John Cena or Rocky and walk around with the safety belt.
“I had to go out on a limb,” Payne says. “I bought the belt and then with no notice or notification, I just started carrying around on my shoulder in the yard. So, everybody sees me and is like, ‘What is that dude doing?’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a safety champ. Do you know anybody?’ And then within the end of that month, that’s when we have nominees and they started figuring it out.”
Payne says that the safety program also helps employees feel heard.
“Let’s say he reports there’s a banana peel on the ground,” Payne says. “It’s a hazard. It doesn’t matter what language you speak. It’s a hazard. If he reports that to me, and I’m the manager and I take care of it. He feels heard. He feels validated. He feels like now he can talk to me about maybe other things. It does do that, I think. You’re building better relationships with your employees based on trust.”
Payne says it’s a case of being a safety camp counselor versus a safety cop. Nobody wants to just get in trouble where it’s purely transactional, and there’s no emotion.
“If you do the camp counselor approach, you’re still the authority, but he can work with you to get you to success,” Payne says.
Payne says that everyone has their own way of promoting safety, but you have to find strategies that get safety in front of your employees’ minds.
“You can find a way to get your employees engaged in safety and not have to spend a fortune,” Payne says. “You should be seeing reductions in your incident rates, your property damage rates. If your employees feel validated, heard, I’ll say loved, that can improve their physical safety as well. Morale is boosted. They feel good about coming to work.”
