Building a Culture of Safety

The Situation

About three months ago, an assembly worker at Fordham Spring Manufacturing (FSM) narrowly avoided a fatal assembly-line accident. While the company had avoided an accident with an injury for nearly 950 days, the company’s president, Jackie Bentworth, was extremely concerned. The narrowly avoided accident was one of at least three such incidents in the past year. As a result, she formed the Safety Guidelines Committee to develop new procedures to improve the safety culture. Jackie assigned Roy Bang, an engineer, to lead this seven-person committee.

The committee developed a 65-page, comprehensive guidebook called the Fordham Spring Manufacturing Safety Guidelines. Roy placed the guidelines on the company’s intranet where all employees could see them. He also broke the guidelines into separate webpages so that employees could easily find sought after information quickly. He also planned to lead employee town hall meetings about the new safety guidelines on June 3, June 8, and June 10. He hoped all managers would attend these town hall meetings.

Roy wanted to share the new responsibilities and guidelines with employees throughout the organization. He decided to personally contact each of the managers to provide an overview of their responsibilities. First, he decided to contact mid-level managers because they played a major role in promoting safety among supervisors and assembly-line employees. FSM currently had eight mid-level managers. Each of these managers oversaw production of one of FSM’s core products. The current managers included Steve Easton, Jeffrey Thompson, Deshawn Miles, Angie Zambroni, Brad Wilhemson, Parker Jones, Sandra Argesion, and Daniel King.