Engaging employees in the safety agenda

Accidents – Zero Tolerance
(AZT) was launched in May
2007 as a catalyst to take
Norbord’s safety
performance to a new level
and, five years later, the
company has achieved the
goal of an OSHA rating of <1. However, it has also created a new challenge: how to take the safety performance to an even greater level. Five years ago, Norbord had an OSHA rating of >2,
but for Steve Roebuck,
human resources director
this was not good enough.

He explains: “We had got
to a pretty good place in our
safety performance through
introducing new systems,
compliance, physical
guarding etc, but we found
we’d reached a plateau.
“The first job of the AZT
working group was to find
out what the barriers were to
moving forward and that’s
how we developed the AZT
principles: the reshaping of
personal responsibility and
the changing of perception
and risk.

Roebuck said it was a
challenging initiative because
of scepticism and the
lingering perception that
safety is up to someone else
to fix. However, by
developing tools to help
employees, engaging them in
the safety agenda and
keeping the AZT message
consistent and continuous,
the new safety culture began
to take hold.