Peabody Energy: Changed from the Top Down
All-out commitment from its CEO launched a safety transformation for this award-winning coal company.
ACHIEVING safety excellence in mining is neither easy nor inexpensive, but sometimes it can be done relatively fast. St. Louis-based Peabody Energy has won four Sentinels of Safety awards, many Holmes Safety Association awards, and numerous federal and state mine rescue champion's trophies in the past decade, but its safety record was so-so as recently as 1990, said Dave Beerbower, the coal company's vice president of safety for the past 14 years. The catalyst for a radical change in Peabody's approach to safety came that year when new CEO Irl F. Engelhardt took over.
Beerbower said Engelhardt was intensely committed to safety because his father had died in a trucking accident when Irl was a child. "The first thing that he did was to start a new safety initiative, just raising the expectation level for all of our employees and laying out there what his vision was for safety within the company. And we really started to improve immediately starting in 1990," Beerbower said. "We went from an incident rate of 16, which is 16 accidents per 200,000 manhours, to 4 to 4.5 [by 1994-95]. It was a 75 percent improvement, roughly. And that was directly the result of the way we managed safety. We required it of our front-line supervisors and the mine managers to take it very seriously and to work on some very strong ways to build teams at the mines, eliminating hazards and looking at ways we could make our mines safer.
"It's not just talking about safety," he explained. "It's actually holding managers accountable for their safety performance, letting them know that unsafe mines are just not the way we're going to do business."
Supervisor and peer observations are part of the safety approach at Peabody, which is the world's largest private-sector coal company. Teams at all levels are the framework for its program. An executive safety committee that includes current CEO Gregory Boyce, Beerbower, and group executives from each region meets two to three times annually and communicates new initiatives to a 14-member central safety and health team of operational and safety managers from various regions who work more on tactical matters. Each mine has a safety and health team of nine to 15 members, including the operations manager, mine foreman, miners, and supervisors. Audits examine how these teams are working, what they do with their data, and how they ensure the quality of observations made at each mine. Peabody gathers best practices and posts them on an intranet site so other mines can benefit, while representatives from each region who are on the central team also bring good practices back home. Information flows up and down in this way, Beerbower said.
When Boyce took over, he brought in DuPont Safety Resources for guidance to begin looking at behaviors. Starting in 2003 with a clear vision statement ("We will operate safe workplaces that are incident-free."), the company brought in its 175 senior operations and safety managers for a two-day seminar where the CEO explained his vision and expectations for safety. "It was a big push for some of these guys," Beerbower recalled. "I think we still had some managers who said, 'Look, no matter what I do, people are still going to get hurt.' We really had to attack that mindset."
What came next, in 2004, was three days of safety observation training for 1,100 line supervisors, including one full day devoted to practicing the techniques on miners working in a nearby mine. When this phase ended in early 2005, Peabody started one-day sessions for all 7,400 hourly workers to help them understand the observations weren't punitive, but instead were intended to gather data and identify unsafe practices that can lead to accidents. Each mine collects its data and enters it into a database that has great value for spotting trends, Beerbower said. "We require the front-line supervisors to do one [observation] every day, and in those observations there can be up to 30 to 40 individual items that they're looking at. To date, we have well over 600,000 items that we have audited. This is just over the course of a year or so."
About 96 percent of these 600,000 items are positive/safe behaviors, he said. "We've reinforced those positive behaviors as well as worked to correct those unsafe behaviors. We're working to improve the quality of the observations. Do I believe there's only 3 to 4 percent unsafe behaviors throughout the company? No. But we're constantly improving the process."
Asked how much the behavioral effort cost, Beerbower answered, "You know what? I don't know. It might seem strange that I don't know the cost, but the benefit of working for a company like this is that the CEO has given us whatever resources we need to improve. If we believe it's the right thing to do, he says, 'Do it.' "
Peabody Energy has a comprehensive, zero-tolerance drug testing program, as well as an employee assistance program to help any worker who has a drug problem and voluntarily seeks help. Any contractor that comes to work on its sites must have a drug testing program.
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.