“From a safety standpoint we don’t look at safety as a priority, we view safety as a value that is ingrained into our DNA and part of our decision-making process.”
Paul Abrams, SVP EHS, at NFI Industries says he’s not a safety guy in the traditional sense, rather a business guy who loves safety. NFI Industries is a fully integrated third-party supply chain solutions provider, serving customers all over the world. In 2019 Paul joined NFI to re-imagine how the company thinks about safety. The 90-year-old family-owned business has 350 locations and 16,000 employees. As Paul told our audience at our recent HSE summit.
“The goal was to create a mindset, via proactive awareness and employee involvement that is built upon care and concern for our people that ultimately strengthens a trusting partnership between management and the employees by focusing everyone on the behavior of all.”
–Paul Abrams, SVP EHS, NFI Industries
In 2019 NFI industries looked at their safety culture and realized they were too punitive and too reactive and that meant it was time for change. That’s when the 4Ps of safety was born.
The 4Ps of Safety
- Positive Mindset – Recognizing employees, celebrating their success, and embracing some peer accountability so everyone can stay focused on the goals.
- Proactive Actions – In order to partner in the field and create shared learnings, NHI built a behavioral based safety module for safety observations, good catches and root cause analysis delivered from employee’s mobile phones. They moved away from the word ‘audit’ and are moving to a safety portal where all training is readily available online. It helps them to see unsafe behaviors in real-time and then leaders can address to reduce injuries.
- Preventing Incidents – Concerned with stopping something from happening and again getting away from the word audit and turning this into a learning opportunity.
- Predictive Technologies – Started implementing software and wearables to help predict where or when an injury may occur answering the questions, what time of day? What shift? What location?
“The biggest impact I have seen in wearables is a rather significant injury reduction rate but I think equally as important is we saw our scores from engagement related to safety go from about 85% which is still industry best, the last month 100%, so 100% of our employees surveyed believe that we are 100% behind them in terms of safety and that for me is the grand slam, our employees know that we have their backs,” Paul shares.
The more they positively engaged with employees, the more they saw injuries drop. Suddenly, safety experts at NHI were being seen as a collaborative partner and not just someone with a clipboard, pointing out all the things that are wrong. Paul says, “the partnership of employee involvement was critical, and the employees actually own the process, and we are supporting them throughout the way.”
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