A Cut Above the Rest
Employees at Westervelt Lumber have a stake in being safe. It partly involves steak.
Sawn fingers, severed limbs, crushed
torsos, and blinded eyes are among
the many and sometimes deadly
injuries common to sawmill work. Today’s
laser-enhanced, electronically operated
blades are a far cry from the water-powered
saws of yesteryear, but the industry’s hazards
have remained largely the same since
the nation’s first mill was built at
Jamestown, Va., in 1608. Four hundred
years later, OSHA still considers
sawmilling one of the most dangerous
occupations in the country for good
reason: The work involves all manner of
moving machinery, most of which is heavy
and razor sharp.
Click here to see the OH&S photo essay that accompanies this story.
As recently as two years ago, the sawmill
operated by The Westervelt Company in
Moundville, Ala., was regularly logging its
share of injuries and increasing the
industry’s bloody total. A large-scale operation,
the facility produces about 1.1 million
board feet of southern yellow pine lumber
every day (approximately 50 truckloads)
while also making more than 70 truckloads
of chips per day for the paper industry. The
site’s operations include boilers, a timber
mill, a planer mill, dry kilns, and a pole mill.
Its 325 associates work in three shifts.
In business since the 1970s, the mill has
never suffered a fatality, but by 2005 it was
experiencing a host of what its Wood
Products Vice President Joe Patton calls
“severe injuries,” including “broken arms
and ribs and having someone squeezed in a
piece of machinery and that type of
thing—all of which involved very heavy
equipment that could easily kill people.”
The corporate office demanded change.
Slowly, at first, according to Patton, that
began to happen. Before long, thanks to a
concerted effort by owners, managers, and
every mill employee, the accident rate
began to decrease. The word “accident,”
in fact, began to be consciously hewn from
the mill workers’ vocabulary and replaced
with the phrase “preventable
injury,” which Patton, a 10-year
veteran of the facility, cites as a
subtle but telling example of a sea
change in the site’s approach to
conducting business.
“I think the mentality at the
plant used to be that, well, you’re
working around dangerous equipment;
sometimes you’re just going
to get hurt, and there’s not much
you can do to avoid it,” Patton
says. “That’s not the mentality
now. . . . We decided we had to put
the brakes on what was happening
and make sure we didn’t have to
tell someone’s family that their
family member wasn’t coming
home.” Ensuring that, he added,
meant adopting a new work culture
highlighted by a renewed
approach to safety—one in which
no injury was considered run of the mill.
Looking Sharp
In 2006, Westervelt Lumber recorded 25
injuries and had an OSHA recordable rate
of 6.9. By press time in late 2007, the mill
had recorded four injuries total for the
year, including two back strains, an infected
wound from a metal shaving that infiltrated
a worker’s glove, and a splinter from a
board that stuck one worker in the
stomach. All four occurred in the first
quarter of the year.
“Severity of the injury is not what we’re
looking at,” Patton notes. “Basically, we’re
looking at eliminating all injuries—all
those things that can turn to serious.”
From late April 2007 to the end of the
year, the mill was successfully doing just
that—eliminating all injuries. By
December, it had logged more than eight
months—well more than a half million
work hours—without a single recordable
injury, setting a new company record that,
as of this writing, is still in progress.
Patton attributes the remarkable turnaround
in results to a companywide commitment
toward making safety happen,
beginning at the top with Westervelt President
and CEO Michael E. Case and
extending to every hourly employee. Discussing
the mill’s newfound safety culture,
the word Patton most often repeats is
“accountability”; the name he most often
repeats is Jimmy Swindle.
Hired two years ago as corporate safety
manager, Swindle immediately set about
analyzing the mill’s operations and closely
investigating the incidents that were formerly
referred to as “accidents.” What he
found was that every injury, without exception,
was preventable and the mill metric
most in need of an upgrade was awareness.
So he began finding ways to institute it.
He hung banners (“Safety is an Attitude.
. . . How’s yours?”). He shored up the
mill’s lockout/tagout and machine
guarding programs. He began holding regular safety meetings. He began performing
monthly safety audits during which he and
Operations Manager Tommy Clemmons,
usually also joined by a department manager
or shift supervisor, walk the mill floor
with camera in hand, making a visit to an
unannounced part of the facility. According
to Clemmons, the visits are designed to
find any area where improvements can be
made—but that’s not all.
“What we’re really trying to do is
‘catch’ people doing something right in
this,” he says. In the event that something
is not being done right, whether it’s an outright
violation or a housekeeping procedure
that could be done better, the auditors
duly note it and give workers in that particular
area a week to get it right.
Meanwhile, Swindle formed what he
calls SAW (Safety And Wellness) teams.
Composed of workers from both day and
night shifts, these meet monthly in extra
meetings. Along with supervisors, they perform
safety audits of their own several
times each week, following up on the
observations from Swindle’s and Clemmons’
audit when necessary. The success of
the SAW teams spawned the creation of
both a Fall Prevention team and a Repetitive
Motion team, which perform similar
observations in their respective areas.
“This is not just supervisors telling
everybody to be safe,” Patton says of the
teams. “The reason this program is so successful
is that we’re letting hourly associates
get together in groups, and they’re
identifying the unsafe areas and acts and
calling them to attention. They are the
ones who are more out there on the floor
every day, seeing the things that go on, and
we listen to them. It’s a process-driven
endeavor that Tommy and Jimmy have
really fine-tuned to get our associates driving
what we do to make things safer.”
Swindle adds that implementation of
the teams has proven to be an effective
process for measuring safety
in much the same way other
mill departments measure
production. “There’s an old
saying that goes, ‘What gets
measured gets done,’” he
says. “Well, here we’re measuring
safety every way possible.
Since we started the
SAW program, the associates
have taken ownership of it.
They are making safety
happen here, and we’re
rewarding them for it.”
Let Them Eat Steak
The rewards of which
Swindle speaks come primarily in two
forms at the mill, and both involve green,
leafy trimmings. The first is derived from
the company’s gain-sharing program that
ties in metrics for safety, performance, and
production. Associates are grouped in
teams—one for the boiler area, another
for the pole mill, and so on. When the
groups meet their metrics on all fronts,
they receive a cash bonus daily and
weekly, according to Patton. Each team is
considered separately for the program,
and if anyone on the team fails to meet the
metrics during a given period—whether
it’s for being written up for an unsafe act
or, worst-case scenario, having an injury—
then that team is ineligible for gainsharing
participation and gets no bonus
that week.
Patton says since the program
launched, its most notable development
has been the dramatic rise in the timbre of
teamwork throughout the mill. “It definitely
encourages individuals to look out
for their buddies,” he says. “It used to be,
‘I’m going to look out for myself, and
everybody else can worry about themselves,’
but now, by bringing people
together in teams, it’s more a matter of,
‘Hey, I’ve got to look out for you in order
to get my bonus!’”
Having employees look out for each
other was always the hoped-for result of
the team-approach plan, Swindle says. Initially,
he adds, workers were reluctant to
speak up, but once it became clear what
was at stake, their willingness to intervene
gradually improved. Curiously, though, the
intervention most often discussed around
the mill has less to do with the bonuses and
more to do with beef, he says. Which
brings up the second major safety incentive
in place at Westervelt.
“‘Hey, don’t do that! You’re going to
mess up my steak dinner!’ You hear that a
lot around here,” Swindle says. The
reason is that any time the mill logs 60
days without a recordable injury, all associates
are treated to a banquet in their
honor with steaks, baked potatoes, salads,
and other accoutrements, prepared and
served to them on site by their supervisors
and company managers. Swindle conceived
the plan about a year ago, and
although it took a while for the mill to hit
the mark, he says associates have now
thoroughly sunk their teeth into it. In
mid-October, the company held its third
consecutive cookout and at press time was
days away from achieving its fourth.
To accommodate all shifts, the celebrations
are around-the-clock affairs. After
the initial cookout, Patton recalls, “We
asked the supervisors if we were going to
need to have this thing catered because
they were staying up all night and all day
long, cooking, preparing, and getting all
this stuff set up. But they said, ‘No, if our
guys are going to be safe and put forth the effort to earn it, then we can cook.’ And I
think that says a lot.”
The appetites of lumber workers are
historically famous, and Swindle admits
there are less pricey programs he could
have initiated, though probably few as
tasty. Each cookout costs about $3,500, he
says, adding that it is a price the corporate
office is glad to pay. “It’s worth every
penny of it because we’ve got people
going home in their car instead of in an
ambulance,” he says.
Patton adds that all of the programs in
place at the mill are possible because of the
approval and support they receive from the
company’s leaders. “We give out different,
extra little awards from time to time, and
between those and our steaks and gain
sharing, you know, it all costs money. But
it’s a cost our CEO and our president of the
board stand firmly behind. From the time
we wanted to put these programs in,
they’ve said, ‘We are committed to safety,
and we want you guys to know we’re committed,
so we’re going to hold you
accountable and want you to hold associates
accountable and have every associate
hold each other accountable, because
there’s not one board cut out there that’s
worth anybody’s health or life.’ So, it’s that
commitment from top to bottom with an
emphasis on accountability and having the
right incentive packages that have made the
whole thing work,” Patton says.
Blade Running
Back before Westervelt knew what would
work, Patton and others representing the
mill sought out other organizations with
effective safety plans and asked for advice.
Two companies in particular welcomed
them in: Federal Way, Wash.-based Weyerhaeuser
Co., which has locations
throughout the southeast and which Patton
describes as “a friendly competitor”; and
Hartsville, S.C.-based Sonoco Co., a Westervelt
customer that provides packaging
products. Safety leaders at both companies
gladly shared their time and experience and
were instrumental in getting Westervelt
going in the right direction, Patton says.
“Sometimes companies don’t want to
share information about how they do
things, especially in their mills, thinking it
might give people a competitive edge,”
Patton notes. “But when we mentioned
safety, Weyerhaeuser opened its doors to us
and said, ‘Come on in, and we’ll show you
some of the things that we do.’ And we
were just very thankful for that.”
He says Sonoco leaders, meanwhile,
offered this advice: “They said, ‘The one
thing you have to remember is that safety is
not a sprint; it’s a marathon, and it has
taken us five or six years to get to this
level.’” By those standards, Westervelt has
just begun the race. Yet, with the success
the company has already tasted within two
years of overhauling its programs and
installing its own brand of incentives, the
mill is already looking to the future.
“Now, we want to be the ones that
people come to about safety,” Swindle says.
“We want people knocking the door down,
finding out what we’re doing right."
This article originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.