At the 2016 Safety Leadership Conference in Pittsburgh, in a session called Advice from America’s Safest Companies, Scot Forge’s Manager of Safety & Environmental John P. McGillivray explained how Scot Forge reached safety culture excellence.

The road to a stronger safety culture runs directly through a company’s safety program. So what program did McGillivray attribute to helping build the new safety culture at Scot Forge? We’re proud to say that SafeStart was the program that checked a lot of boxes and married well with their overall safety management system.

Since implementing SafeStart in 2010, Scot Forge’s TIR rate had a 73% decrease. And the improvements don’t stop there:

• Frequent observations. Scot Forge’s employee-owners now conduct almost 70 peer-to-peer observations a day.
• Addressing human factors. Human factors are considered in everything they do—from maintenance work orders to toolbox talks and more.
• Employee engagement. Every person at Scot Forge looks out for one another and feels a sense of personal responsibility for safety. As a result, 75% of Scot Forge’s production departments have been injury free for over a year.

When McGillivray  arrived on site he needed to overhaul the existing safety program (in this EHS Today article McGillivray explains that “the safety manual was ‘borrowed’ from another local company. Everywhere the original company’s name appeared, it was meticulously crossed out and ‘Scot Forge’ was written above it.”). He also had to find a solution for their high TIR and DART rates. And to do that, he needed to engage employees and improve the safety culture.

Six years after implementing SafeStart, he’s done exactly that. Injuries are down. Daily safety observations are up. And production has improved alongside the safety culture. SafeStart shifted the focus of Scot Forge to create a culture that aligns with safety on and off the job.

Read more about Scot Forge’s safety success with this case study. You can also learn about the SafeStart and the connection between safety, productivity, human factors and organizational systems by registering for this free webinar—it’s well worth watching for anyone who wants to achieve Scot Forge’s amazing safety results. Or check out a 1-Day Discovery Workshop to get the full picture.