The Safety Leadership Conference

Hazard identification is key to effective risk management. Often gaps exist in our ability to identify hazards because we simply fail to see them as a result of how our brains are wired. Failing to identify hazards impacts the credibility of our risk management process and endangers our workers. This session will share tools and techniques associated with Visual Literacy, providing participants a new approach for how to see their working environments in more detail. A systematic approach that helps expose the hazards we often miss, the ones that remain unseen and hidden in the background until an incident occurs. Participants will also hear from Nestle, who were looking to broaden the impact of their “Where’s Waldo” hazard identification program. Hear what steps they took to integrate Visual Literacy into this existing process and how it’s provided a structured framework to help them better identify hazards and manage risks.

As COVID-19 spread throughout the U.S., Compass Group’s safety team sprang into action. With seven operating companies, 10,000 locations and 240,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, the diversified food services company had to keep employees and customers safe while maintaining critical operations. Learn how Compass Group’s safety team adapted existing frameworks and systems to meet heightened workplace safety measures and reporting protocols to maintain safe operations throughout the pandemic and even natural disasters. Gain insights on responding to major crises and strengthening operational resiliency, including leveraging a strong safety culture, cross-disciplinary collaboration, external resources and new technology.

The days of dusty safety policy binders and motivational posters are long past us—or at least they should be. To get to the next level of organizational safety, you need to develop a safety culture in which each employee is fully committed to the safety effort. In this session, you will learn several strategies and tactics to engage all your employees in the process of hazard identification, risk mitigation and safety improvement in formats that resonate with today's diverse workforce.

If your organization has a shaky or even contentious relationship with OSHA, listen up. Change doesn't happen overnight, but it clearly needs to start—now. This presentation, from a past winner of EHS Today’s America’s Safest Companies award, will provide insight on the specific factors that can jump-start any organization on its pursuit to safety excellence. And it all starts and ends with effective leadership.

Factories are constantly evolving ecosystems: lines change to adapt to new demands, robots roam warehouse floors and materials shuffle around to prepare for new products. While change is constant on factory floors, the one thing that stays the same is the importance of safety. A fundamental building block of any safety program is ensuring workers always have a means to an emergency exit that's clear and unobstructed. Not only is this a priority for employee's safety, but at any time, OSHA can send inspectors to examine whether warehouses are compliant with safety regulations. Flex Ltd.’s Seth Woody, senior director of global EHS, and Barac Ponce, global project manager, will share how the company implemented a hardware-agnostic intelligent physical workspace platform that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to detect potential hazards in egress pathways.

While many companies are still refining how they’ll safely bring employees back to the office, not every business can operate with a 100 percent remote workforce. For some, essential employees need to be onsite at all times. When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, safety officers, HR teams, and company executives at essential businesses instituted new policies for onsite employees based on CDC and local health guidelines. Meanwhile, newer technologies were introduced to support these businesses. The most popular ones were developed for health screenings, accurate temperature checks, and contact tracing. Now, when employees, subcontractors and visitors enter the office or a job site, they’ve been conditioned to use these technologies before they start working. Essential businesses got a jump start on COVID-19 technologies. Along with providing immediate benefits to stop the spread of the virus, they’re realizing additional benefits from these technologies. For example, digital check-in apps are replacing paper based visitor logs and shared clipboards and pens with handwritten information, saving hours of time each day. Based on employees using their own smartphones and a dedicated onsite QR code, the digital check-ins can be customized to the employee’s language and onsite responsibilities, and linked to their site supervisor. The data and analytics behind the check in information supports strategic planning and adherence to safety guidelines, compliance requirements, and OSHA guidelines. While the pandemic has upended the way we work in offices and on job sites, there are long-term benefits to be gained from these newer technologies. Initially built to address the pandemic, they are evolving to support on-going business needs.

Culture and engagement have always been crucial to a Best in Class Safety Program. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath has placed even more importance on safety programs with proactive and two-way communication. Technology has provided new opportunities to easily implement customized, scalable and evolving solutions to support your safety program and engage employees at every level of the organization. This presentation will focus on the latest technology and explore possible cases that to drive change and improve safety metrics.