Smooth Sailing
Veolia Water North America has taken its safety to the next level through training and a focus on areas of concern.
Veolia Water North America, the
nation’s largest services provider
for municipal and industrial
water and wastewater systems and
facilities, takes safety very seriously. Our company
understands not only the impact safety
has on our bottom line, but also its impact on
our employees’ morale and ability to go home
to their families the way they left them. From
2000 to 2005, the organization saw its safety
performance level off with little or no improvement,
year over year.
In 2005, our company had a recordable
incidence rate of 6.2 and a lost-time incidence
rate of 1.4. At that time, both of these were
better than the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS) averages for the industry, but Veolia’s
leadership wanted more. The main challenges
included sustaining worker and workplace
safety at a heightened level at all times, improving
on accident reduction, and closing
the gap between the numbers of accidents occurring
at industrial sites and those at municipal
operations.
Veolia Water North America designs,
builds, operates, and manages various types
of facilities, programs, and systems, such as
water and wastewater treatment and reclamation
facilities, water distribution systems,
wastewater collection systems, groundwater
remediation systems, residuals and composting
facilities and related distribution programs,
and combined sewer overflow facilities.
The company employs some 2,700
people and works with more than 270 municipal
and industrial customers.
Incident Reporting
and Accountability
With a desire to boost the organization’s
safety performance, management set aggressive
targets for the 2006 calendar year.
The targets were put in place knowing that
it would take a lot of effort and dedication
in order to achieve them.
Senior and regional managers did more
than talk about safety; they made people accountable
for working safely and were passionate
about it. Targets were set for the organization
with continuous improvement
milestones for each geographical region of
the company or operating unit and target-setting
for area managers with direct oversight
of assigned projects.
Key senior and regional management
personnel (up to and including the president
and CEO) now receive an automated Immediate
Notification Report (INR) via email
within 24 hours after an injury, vehicle
accident, or environmental incident has occurred.
This INR, which is an output of Veolia’s
proprietary, Web-based data management
software, is a condensed report that
summarizes the incident location, case type,
and who was involved.
This has been a critical component of our
organization’s success because it has forced
anyone who was on the fence about safety and
compliance to move to the right side. Knowing
the CEO is following up on almost every
incident report tells employees that the only
way to avoid the spotlight is to work safely and
encourage those around them to work safely,
as well. Moreover, the INR is designed to make
sure all incidents get prompt and appropriate
resources to best manage or mitigate the event.
Each incident that occurs at Veolia is entered
into the online database. It serves to
document incident investigations, complete
with who, what, when, and where; root cause
identification; corrective and preventive actions;
and assignments for responsible parties.
In addition to all of its inherent monitoring,
tracking, and reporting capabilities,
this program complies with federal OSHA
recordkeeping requirements.
Reporting and tracking alone did not
allow us to achieve our targets. Our team of
Environmental Health, Safety & Security professionals
developed a list of key challenges
that were hindering the safety performance of
the organization. For each challenge, we came
up with a solution to ensure we would reduce
work-related injuries and illnesses and, as a
result, achieve the aggressive targets set by our
company’s leadership.
We have developed an annual training
calendar and complete this training at sites
across the country through a combination of
in-house subject matter experts, e-learning
modules, contractors and vendors, and
monthly safety packets produced and posted
on the EHS&S section of our intranet site. Allison
Brigitzer, a member of the EHS&S staff,
compiles and organizes the training materials,
with each training topic including a PowerPoint
® presentation complete with speaker
notes, handouts, and quizzes. Providing people
with everything they need to execute the
training increases the likelihood that the
training is executed, we’ve found, and this is
yet another example of the corporate staff
providing the tools for success and those in
the field being successful.
By sharing lessons learned through internal
electronic messaging, the company is also
bringing awareness to the types of incidents
that are occurring. When incidents occur
within the organization or are featured in the
news, EHS&S issues a companywide Safety
Alert that includes a summary of the incident,
a list of potential serious injuries that
could have occurred, root cause analysis, and
preventive and corrective actions.
Focused on Inattention
We launched a new initiative in January
2008 after looking at the number and type
of incidents that historically occur in the
month of January. We realized the incidents
were not caused by inclement weather associated
with the winter season; rather, they
were due to an apparent lack of focus as
business resumed after the holidays. In 2005,
2006, and 2007, we had experienced 21, 11,
and 15 recordable incidents, respectively,
during the month of January alone. But in
January 2008, only six work-related injuries
were recorded at Veolia Water.
We simply brought to light the misunderstanding
that most of our January accidents are the result of winter conditions—when in
reality, these incidents point to an inexcusable
lack of focus. Besides pointing out the problem,
EHS&S prepared and senior management
mandated daily Toolbox Safety Talks
during the month of January 2008. EHS&S
compiled safety topics and sent five of them
to supervisors at the beginning of each week.
By keeping safety on the top of people’s
minds in an aggressive and proactive manner,
we successfully reduced the number of
recordable cases by more than 50 percent.
As a result of this January safety awareness
initiative, Veolia Water is off to an excellent
start, having logged 18 recordable injuries
during the first quarter of 2008, down from
35 for the same period in 2007.
Another opportunity for the organization
has been to evaluate the difference between
safety statistics at our municipal sites versus
industrial projects, which includes refineries,
primary metals, automotive, pharmaceuticals,
and chemicals, to name a few. Because
our safety statistics have been better at our industrial
sites than at our municipal sites, we
identified the successful ingredients and
pushed them out to all Veolia Water projects.
This ensures employees at municipal sites are
held to the same high standards and level of
accountability that refinery customers hold
us to while we work on their properties.
To further maximize resources with the
largest potential return on investment, the
company identified the 15 percent of our projects
that produce upward of 80 percent of the
organization’s work-related accidents. Labeled
“focus facilities,” these sites are participating in
a program that requires additional attention
from the assigned EHS&S professional and
additional activities by those assigned to the
projects. Although these targeted sites still accounted
for 43 percent of the company’s accidents
in 2006, this approach successfully reduced
accidents at the sites by 31 percent in
2006.Work continued with these focus facilities
in 2007, resulting in a further reduction in
accidents at the sites by 28 percent.
Results
Veolia Water North America posted our best
employee safety statistics for a calendar year
in 2006 and in 2007 had an even better year,
with a recordable incidence rate of 3.8 and a
lost-time incidence rate of 0.9. (These compare
to the BLS averages for private-industry
water, wastewater, and other systems of 5.2
and 1.6, respectively.) In addition, 85 percent
of our projects are accident free and 95 percent
are lost-time accident free.
Our success can be credited directly to our
employees. Although we have an EHS&S staff
of 14,we truly believe we have 2,700 employees
with a full-time responsibility for safety
and compliance. It is because of their awareness
and dedication to safety that we have
been successful in our efforts.
This article originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.