Safety Committee/Team Award

Leviat North America – Canby

Organization: Leviat North America serves the commercial concrete construction market by supplying materials, components, and services supporting the installation of concrete structures. The company’s facility in Canby is its main plastic injection molding operation.

Initiatives and accomplishments include:

• The company takes a proactive active approach to safety and health, going beyond regulatory requirements by focusing on three key areas: enhancement of lockout/tagout controls, reducing interactions between forklifts and pedestrians, and improving machine guarding.
• In its proactive approach, the company focuses on continuously building a strong safety culture, including engaging with team members, engineering out risks, and redesigning workflows.
• Employees lead the safety committee, with strong management support. Each employee attends pre-shift huddles that empower them to ask questions and provide feedback on potential safety and health concerns.
• Managers conduct multiple visits to the facility each year. These visits include safety walks with employees, and discussions and plans to address the next safety project.

We believe building and maintaining a strong safety and health culture is important because:

We believe it is important because everyone deserves a place where they are both physically and psychologically safe. We have worked and put in the efforts to create a culture and an environment where we have that.

Throughout the facility, our team members are not afraid to speak out and report issues or concerns. And they are engaged. That engagement is instilled in each team member, from day one, that they have a voice and that voice is heard.

As a management team, we know and understand that the strength of the program is the team. Our culture has been built upon giving that team the confidence to voice concerns and providing an environment for them to help develop solutions to those concerns through empowerment. These efforts have created the strength of our culture, and they are the foundation of our facility’s safety performance.

Our best advice for addressing potential workplace safety and health risks is:

The best advice is to truly take the time to listen to the concerns employees have about processes and risks, and with these concerns, take them seriously.
We believe that team members who are heard, and that have the validation that they are heard, are more likely to buy into the safety culture.

As a leader, taking the time to hear your team, and taking the actions to show them that you care, are what builds trust in the team. Showing them that we care about their safety is what earns their trust. It is what builds that physiologically safe environment and that creates the culture.

Create the culture and your team will tell you what needs to be addressed and where the risks are. They will be active participants in how best to create solutions.