US Aggregates’ Safety Rewards Program has been a way to incentivize employees to be involved with our commitment to a safe workplace environment. Each location has a nominated Safety Champion who is responsible for submitting safety improvements around their site. The submission categories include innovation, improvement, training, high risk, implementation and emergency action drills (EAD). Once entries are submitted, they are graded based on how much of an impact it had on safety and quality of documentation. When a site reaches 1,000 points, every member of that team is given a bonus at the end of the year. Safety Champions are eligible for an additional bonus, providing they stay active with submissions. Each Safety Champion must score at least 250 points each quarter and complete at least one EAD to remain eligible for the bonus.
Safety Manager Eric Reno says spreading the points across the year ensures each site remains focused on safety.
“We changed the points up to make sure the program is on everybody’s mind throughout the entire year, not just once they hit their thousand points.” Eric said.
One of the changes coming to the program next year is an additional category known as 5s, a methodology of organizing, cleaning, and developing in order to sustain a productive work environment. For example, a team could submit cleaning and organizing their boneyard or labeling and organizing tools around the site.
The larger change coming next year will be how each site schedules their Emergency Action Drills. EADs are an excellent way to simulate emergencies or disasters that could happen at the workplace and test how the team would respond. Currently, each site is responsible for scheduling their own drill at any point throughout the year. This new change would assign each plant a month to conduct their EAD.
Eric says the change should help plants stay focused and make EADs easier to prioritize.
“I think this change will help with planning and scheduling, so I feel like it’s going to be a pretty positive change.” Eric said. “Plants will still be free to do a second EAD on their own, but they’ll have to do an EAD in a specific month.”
Read more about EADs we’ve conducted in the past here.
The last change coming to the Safety Rewards Program next year is that each site must have at least one submission related to the safety topic of the month, which comes with an additional 25 bonus points. The topic of the month is made available for everyone to see through the end of the year and covers common topics such as electricity, illumination, fire extinguishers and more. These extra bonus points are meant to make it as easy as possible for each location to get their safety bonus at the end of the year.
“If they just submit a monthly safety topic focus and do their EAD, they’ll hit their thousand points,” Eric said. “We’re making it very easy for them to do it.”
The Safety Rewards Program is one of the many ways we demonstrate that a safe workplace environment is our top priority. Keeping things fresh helps keep our employees engaged and thus, helps keep everyone safe.
Chase Akins and Eric Reno contributed to this article.
