The current trend in occupational safety seems to be employee empowerment. Companies want their employees to step up and take responsibility for safety. They want them to be accountable. It has become clear that handing down mandates and providing step-by-step processes doesn’t really sell with an educated workforce. You’ve got to get them engaged. You’ve got to create a passion for safety.
 
That’s what we wanted at Central Arizona Project (CAP). We have the responsibility of delivering 1.5 million acre feet (nearly 490 billion gallons) of water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona every year, so we knew it was critical to put safety at the center of our mission.

It wasn’t that our safety record was way out of line with the industry standards, but we really weren’t that good, either. We had an old program left over from when the federal government was in charge; we had a few programs of our own in place, but the bigger problem was that our attitude was simply one of compliance.

It was more, what are we obligated to do, rather than what’s the right thing to do? We weren’t driven by a real passion for safety. What we needed at CAP was a cultural shift.

We realized quickly that we had to begin by laying a foundation of trust. We had to demonstrate to our 460 employees that we cared about their safety and well-being, and it wasn’t just about the bottom line. We started by getting some good programs in place that were specific to our organization.

For example, OSHA has set a standard for areas that are considered confined spaces, but those standards really don’t address the huge siphons that CAP runs under the rivers. Our siphons are so big, they’re almost an environment all their own. So we developed our own programs that went beyond the OSHA standards in order to make those siphons habitable for the people who were working inside them.

It took us about two and a half years to get all our programs in place. We looked at asbestos, lead, lock-out/tag-out, personal protective equipment, hearing protection and many other areas. We developed programs that would address each of these various issues in ways that would be specific to the work we do at CAP.

Of course, lots of companies have good safety programs that are specific to the work they do, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a culture of safety. People rarely become passionate about a good asbestos program. So the next step was to begin engaging the workforce.

We started with managers and supervisors, especially in our maintenance areas. 

“That was important,” explains Assistant General Manager of Human Services Donna Murphy, “because we wanted consistency in how things were being done between one department and the next. Now maintenance managers start each of their managers’ meetings with a safety topic and they all participate in the various crew meetings on a regular basis, ensuring that safety is the first item discussed. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore, but then, to get them talking about safety on a regular basis was an important part of the safety process.”

This group of managers and supervisors evolved into a group called the CAPS Committee—Care About People’s Safety. They were tasked with bringing safety excellence to CAP, and one of the first things they asked themselves was, “how will we know when we get there?” They wondered, “Could we use the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) as a roadmap? Could we become a VPP site, the first utility company site in Arizona?”

“We kind of laughed at each other,” recalls Murphy. “It was like a pipe dream. But we decided to go ahead and try it. If nothing else, we thought we could use VPP as a guide to move us toward fewer injuries and a better overall safety program.”

The CAPS Committee was instrumental in getting the necessary buy-in from the maintenance side of the organization. They began to look at the safety processes across departments and developed standards that could be consistently applied. They discussed approaches for handling employees who violated safety procedures and decided discipline might not be the best way to change behavior. They opted instead for a corrective approach that focused on coaching and on making changes to the processes and the facilities to make work activities safer.

Custom guards, for example, were added to the machines in the shop, ladders were mounted on the backs of flatbed trucks for safer loading and unloading, and personal protective equipment was reviewed and modified to more closely match specific jobs. The CAPS Committee also implemented training programs so that employees would begin to understand their own role in the safety process.

Target Zero
Things were really beginning to shift, but many of the changes were still behind the scenes. The real empowerment began to come with a focused internal marketing campaign called Target Zero.
If VPP was the roadmap, Target Zero was the destination. We were convinced that all accidents and injuries were preventable, so we set our sites on zero injuries. No longer would an injury be accepted as a natural consequence of doing the job.

We developed a Target Zero logo that we began to use on all our safety correspondence. Rather than order cookie-cut-ter banners and posters with generic safety messages, we began to develop our own, based on our Target Zero message.

Our strategy was to create a passion for safety by making it personal to our employees. And since the majority of our injuries were sprains and strains, we developed a campaign that would show how preventing sprains and strains on the job could keep employees doing the things they love at home. We posted a ten-foot banner in our employee cafeteria that said “Target Zero: stay in the game.”

Under that we designed posters that showed CAP employees engaged in their favorite leisure activities. The slogan was, “zero injuries keeps you hiking,” “zero injuries keeps you biking, swimming, running,” whatever. We developed a new poster every month and distributed them to every department.
The effect was amazing. Employees began to wait for the next poster to see which co-worker would be featured. The posters were lined up, side-by-side, all over the company with their own unique look and their own unique message. But, even better, we had our own employees endorsing our safety message.

We continued that first campaign for a year. The second year we changed it up. We wanted to let employees know that they weren’t working safely only for themselves, or even for CAP; the real goal was to send them home safely to their families. So we developed a series of posters that showed a bigger-than-life photo of an employee at work. Behind him or her was a family portrait. The slogan was: “John Smith works safely for his family.”

Again we had the personal endorsements. Employees loved seeing their families all over the company. And, what’s more, they began to understand the importance of building a safety culture.
Our campaign is now in its third year. This is the year of responsibility. Our slogan? “I choose safety.” The posters have a photo of an employee in the work setting with his or her signature across the bottom. Alongside the series of posters is a banner that reads, “I made the choice.”

Next to that are four marking pens. Employees, visitors, board members, and family have all walked up and put their signatures on the banner. Not only that, but departments have asked for smaller versions of their own to put in their individual departments.

It didn’t seem possible, but safety has become our passion. Our injuries, which historically averaged between 50 and 60 a year with about 35 to 40 being lost-time injuries, have been dramatically reduced to about 10 per year with only three involving lost time. We’ve developed a new safety vision that focuses on employee empowerment and has been broadened to include health and wellness. In August of this year we became the 16th company in the state of Arizona and the only Arizona utility to achieve VPP Star Site Status.

I think what got us here is trust. It’s trust in what we do and what we say. It’s managers trusting employees; it’s employees trusting managers. It’s communicating your expectations and backing up your words with actions.

We’re proud of all these achievements, and we’re proud of the employees who brought us to this point. We will continue to look at every day as another opportunity for Target Zero. But in reality, it’s not about the goal. It’s about the passion for what that goal means. FSM
Mike Cook is safety manager with the Central Arizona Project, which operates the canal that brings water from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona. It is Arizona’s largest resource for renewable water supplies.