Building an Internal Culture of Safety
“We want to establish a core group of safety minded individuals at EPIC, “ says Paul Kirksey, EPIC’s EH&S manager. “This group will be in charge of keeping safety top of mind for all EPIC employees.”
For this plan to work they are selecting a strategic emergency response team from employees that do not regularly travel. These engineers, administrative team members and fab plant employees will be the knowledge base and leaders during an emergency.
Keep Safety Top of Mind
The certification for CPR and safety training expires every two years, so EPIC will hold sessions every other year. But, it is not just one class; it is the foundation that we are working to lay in our safety program and culture of the company.
With the growth of the company, safety is an item that can easily fall off of the primary radar screen. “So we are actively doing something to prevent that from happening,” said Seitz.
“From a statistical standpoint the number of injuries increases with the number of employees, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” “We have very few workplace injuries from an OSHA compliant standpoint and that goes back to 2008,” Seitz said. And everything has been very minor. Her plan is to keep it that way.
“Making sure that everyone has a safety mindset, the more we spread that out via our emergency response team, the more we have safety as a culture in our company. Safety spider webs to different departments, because someone has it as their top of mind priority.