Announcement Uncorking a Culture of Safety

September 5, 2019

The crew at ANBL (Alcohol NB Liquor) is accustomed to serving up customer care in every interaction. When it came to safety, the team knew there was work to do.

“ANBL realized we had a safety problem when our accidents were on the incline, our cost of claims, and duration of claims was increasing,” said Amy Donaghy, Safety Partner for ANBL.

“A major step we took was to reach out to WorkSafeNB for their help. We worked together to build a Safety Leadership plan.”

That plan included bringing together over 400 participants to focus on improving the culture of safety in the organization. “A key element of that was buy in at all levels. We had an executive management team member at each session to impart that safety was a priority across the organization.”

Their feedback brought on three major changes:

  • Implementing Safety Heroes
  • Improving forklift training
  • Revising the Joint Health and Safety Committees

“We have Safety Heroes in every location to champion safety leadership with their colleagues. A revamp of the forklift training program brought employees together to find the best and safest way to get work accomplished. We also improved our joint health and safety committees to be more effective.”

Here’s how the implemented the changes:

  • Dissolved the central provincial JHSC that existed representing 42 location,  but wasn’t well represented geographically and had low participation
  • Created individual store JHSC’s for any locations of 20 or above.
  • Switched to four regional committees for retail store to ensure better representation from all points of the province and bring increased relevance when discussing hazards and incidents due to differences.

So how have all these changes had an impact?

Absolutely. “Accidents have decreased. Another improvement is seeing our employee engagement scores increase as a result.”

“We recognize Safety as a key indicator of organizational excellence,” said Reid Estey, Vice President of People and Culture for ANBL. “Our goal is to create, build, and establish safety into every process, kindness in every interaction, and success in our business.” ​ 

Amy credits building safety leadership into the vision of the organization with helping to sustain the change.

“Our safety vision is to be safe, be kind, and be successful. The targets set for the organization cannot be achieved without getting the job done safely.”

 

 

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