Giving Safety A Lift At the Grande Prairie Sawmill

"Danger" and "sawmill" seem to be naturally associated words, yet Weyerhaeuser Canada's Grande Prairie sawmill site, after 25 years of operation, holds one of the best safety records in the industry. However, being among the best in one industry isn't good enough, according to Doug Chappell, dry side manager. "We want to be the best in the world in all industries. So although we do benchmark ourselves against our own industry, we also benchmark ourselves against some of the world leaders in safety," he explained.

Weyererhaeuser Corporation, with headquarters in Tacoma, Washington, and 40,000 people on the payroll, is one of the largest integrated forest product companies in the world. Weyerhaeuser Canada, headquartered in Kamloops, Canada, employs 4000 people. As a subsidiary of Weyerhaeuser Corporation, the Canadian branch operates 10 sawmills, three pulp mills, three oriented strand board (OSB) mills and one paper plant. The Grande Prairie site runs an integrated pulp mill and sawmill.In 1996 the sawmill operation's leaders decided to include a safety breakthrough initiative as an integral part of the annual strategic business plan. The sawmill's 200 employees shared an admirable safety record, but Chappell and other sawmill leaders wanted to take safety to a higher level. "You can only do so much with engineering," he said. "You can have the safest plant in the world, but if people aren't behaving in a safe manner, they're still going to get hurt. In industry, when we start working on safety, we do all of the obvious things - engineering-type fixes, reengineering equipment and creating a safer environment. Those things will drive your injury rates down to some level, but then you start to plateau. Until you get to the behavioral aspects of safety, you're simply not going to drive your injury rate below that plateau, and you certainly won't be working in terms of world-class results on safety."

At the Grande Prairie planer mill, two shifts of 20 people each, produce up to 60,000 pieces of lumber per shift. The workers continually move lumber down a 300-foot single line in a process that requires repeated physical handling, stacking, flipping and grading of each piece. One might call it backbreaking or, at least, back-straining labor, and five years ago, the data proved that description true. In a group of 40 employees over a 12-month period, seven suffered from a varying degree of back injury-the largest single type of injury in the facility. The data strongly indicated that back injury should be a priority focus for the safety-initiative breakthrough process, but as Chappell stated, " As usual we did all kinds of work on the antecedent side." Soon employees were involved in the site's back power program that included proper lifting technique demonstrations, regular back education videos, even an individual observation/consultation (with a physiotherapist) for each employee. The education was valuable and the back injuries dwindled to zero, but Chappell had misgivings. "I felt like the absence of back injuries was a lot more good luck than good management. I wasn't as tuned-in to behavior as I am now, but I did notice that when I walked through the mill, I still observed people doing unsafe behaviors such as lifting things off of the floor the wrong way," he said.The plant's leadership team attended several presentations on a variety of safety processes. They observed that many of the processes primarily targeted leadership activities-planning, future vision, leadership roles. "PM was the only one that really focused on how to change or manage behavior. The way I look at it is we can use some of the planning tools as 'here's where we want to go.' Performance Management is the way to make it happen," Chappell stated.

The leaders of the Grande Prairie site saw PM as a process that could be implemented quickly and that would give everyone a positive experience, thus aligning the workforce. Because the organization had relied on antecedent- heavy programs in the past, the decision was made to underplay the rollout but to educate everyone in the facility about behavioral management methods. "We wanted people to know there is a strategy behind this. We're not just playing games," Chappell explained. We learned that the habit-level behavior in our plant was the unsafe one: bending at the waist to lift things off the floor ," he said. " Accumulative back injuries usually result from long-term unsafe behaviors, so we wanted to replace the unsafe habit behavior with a safe habit behavior-proper lifting-and that's what we designed our process to do."

The Planer Mill Lifting Olympics

To try to let people know that the new safety initiative would be fun, not threatening, Chappell and other safety team members created the theme of the Planer Mill Lifting Olympics. "I made a point of telling people that nothing bad would happen to them if they didn't participate, but good things would happen if they did," said Chappell. Baseline observations showed that, on a daily basis, 28 percent of lifts were performed safely. The group then established bronze, silver and gold medal performance levels as follows: Bronze: 100 percent participation plus 75 percent safe lifts for five consecutive days Silver:100 percent participation plus 90 percent safe lifts for five consecutive days Gold: 100 percent participation plus 98 percent safe lifts for five consecutive days After pinpointing the safe/unsafe lifting behaviors, everyone received a set of observation cards, illustrated with an Olympic torch and a weight lifter and designed to be easily completed within 10 seconds. A large poster blocked off the days and listed each mill worker's name. To receive a sticker credit, each person needed to complete a minimum of one observation per day. Chappell conceded that the posted feedback created a bit of negative reinforcement (via peer pressure) for everyone to participate. Within a few days every employee became involved in the safe lifting observations. But Chappell didn't allow that fact to let himself or other leaders off the hook.

Each manager set a goal to recognize and talk to a minimum of four individuals per day regarding their involvement with the process. "We especially targeted people for recognition who had not participated one day but did participate the next," Chappell stated. "In other words, we tried to get as close to immediate reinforcement as possible for the new behavior of participation."The observation cards included check, boxes for whether a safe or unsafe lift had been observed and a yes or no box for whether the observer provided feedback to the performer. The feedback data helped determine how much, if any, feedback people were receiving out on the floor. The observer then signed his/her name, not the name of the performer, and turned in the card. Chappell was amazed that the 100 percent participation happened within three days, a rate that he thought impressive for a crew of 40 people. He also remained cognizant of indicators of performance that occurs under positive or negative reinforcement conditions. The minimum requirement for meeting the 100 percent participation criteria was 40 observations per day, but Chappell never received less that 45 cards and often as many as 75 percent per day. "That told me that they wanted to. They were doing more than the minimum and that was reinforcing for myself and others who were trying to make this work," he explained.With daily group feedback and fun forms of encouragement, reinforcement and recognition (see below), the lifting Olympics pressed quickly ahead. The bronze medal celebration occurred within two weeks of beginning the initiative - indicating a jump from 28 percent safe lifts to 75 percent. The Olympic Lifting emphasis began in June. By October the mill had sustained over 98 percent of safe lifts for seven weeks. Chappell believes that a majority of the mill workers developed habit-strength safe lifting habits as a result. He is well aware that self-report could involve some cheating, but he dismisses that as an irrelevant factor at the mill. "The bottom line is that if people want to cheat, they will," he said. "When we rolled this out, we told everyone we knew it was very easy for them to simply make up observation cards without doing the observation or to misinform us about the safety of the lifts. But we said, 'The reality is that we'd only be fooling ourselves. This is being done for you. This is a behavior we are trying to help you adjust that will benefit you for a lifetime.'"

An admitted skeptic of former safety improvement results, Chappell now invites visitors to go out on the floor and watch the lifting behaviors of the mill employees. "I know the baseline and what the behaviors looked like before," he asserted. "I observe people lifting quite frequently. And this change is real."For the kickoff of the safe lifting intervention at the Grande Prairie sawmill, Doug Chappell, dry side manager, and his associates drummed up the courage to step out of their comfortable management personas. At the beginning of the Monday morning 7 a.m. shift, Chappell and Linda Thomson, team leader, marched as a two-person parade through the sawmill. Chappell carried a sign stating, "1997 Olympics Team Planer Mill Going for Gold" as his associate led the way carrying an Olympic torch replica. As the two passed by, they were completely ignored by the first few people on the line. "At that point I couldn't help but think, boy is this the right thing to do?" said Chappell.Then a worker farther down the line grinned and gave Chappell a thumbs-up. Soon, others began to respond with encouraging comments. "Overall, the reaction was very positive," Chappell said, and added, "Leadership really needs to get outside of their own comfort zone and that was definitely outside of my comfort zone."Breaking the ice gave the leadership team at Grande Prairie the courage to do more out-of-the-box thinking, such as brainstorming a variety of celebrations. When the mill workers reached the bronze medal performance standard for safe lifting, the managers served them "Bronze Medal Sundaes," covered in bronze butterscotch sauce.

When the two shifts reached the silver medal milestone, Chappell personally baked cupcakes and decorated them with silver icing. "I made them with silver icing. I made a heck of a mess in my wife's kitchen," he said. After labeling the desserts with the words "Silver Medal Cup (cake)," he served them to the crew. "What's a cupcake?" he said, "Yet, I had several people come up and say, 'It's really neat that you did that for us.'"When the mill team reached the gold medal performance level, leadership gave each person an enamel mug embossed in gold with a logo of an Olympic flame and the words, "1997 Lifting Olympics Team Planer Mill Gold Medal Performance." "We hope the cup serves as a memory anchor. If somebody sees the cup sitting in a kitchen or at a workstation and asks about it, then the owner of the cup has a story to tell," Chappell commented. After the planer team achieved gold medal standards, the mill managers wanted to reinforce maintenance of safe lifting behaviors. The managers came up with the idea of drawing four employee names and an activity each for every five consecutive days that the gold (98 percent or more) safe lifting behaviors continued. The rewards for the winning employee included such things as extended lunch hours, lunch with the manager, leadership replacing the employee on the line and giving him/her two hours of free time, or a manager washing the employee's vehicle. "I've learned that folks like almost anything that might be viewed as leadership being humiliated," Chappell said with a laugh. Consequently, when the managers washed an employee vehicle, they did so right outside the lunchroom windows at noon so the whole crew could watch. "People enjoyed it so much they came out with their cameras and took pictures of us washing the vehicle," he said.

With plans to maintain the habit of safe lifting behaviors, the Olympic Lifting initiative ended officially with a closing ceremony and a parade of champions-those who participated 100 percent throughout the program. Two large banners remain in the mill: one, stating, "There's Gold in Them There Lifts" and the other proclaiming, "Every lift is a golden opportunity." "The banners serve as an antecedent/reminder for the safe behavior and as a source of reinforcement when people here get to talk to others who ask questions about the banners," said Chappell. The behaviors of the lifting Olympics appear to have observable staying power. Because of the noisy nature of the mill, verbal feedback isn't always possible, but the people at Grande Prairie can still get the message across. "Quite often somebody 50 feet away will see you lift something; they let out a yell and give you a thumbs-up," said Chappell. "Today, it's difficult to go out there and pick up something off the floor and not get some form of immediate feedback."