EHS Today's America's Safest Companies Conference offers the opportunity to discover the best practices developed by America’s Safest Companies and learn how to implement them in your workplace through compelling presentations and panel discussions with ASC winners, who will share how they became leaders in world-class safety.Four tracks – Safety and Risk Management, Environmental/Sustainability, Compliance and Safety Technology – offer 28 presentations featuring over 40 speakers, as well as two keynote addresses, networking opportunities, and a special conference night out that will feature the 2013 America's Safest Companies winners.
The Safety Technology track, added this year, offers an opportunity to improve your knowledge of plant floor safety technology and learn a new approach to safety measurement that's been created by Rockwell Automation. The Compliance Track features the expertise of some of the nation's top labor attorneys, offering their guidance on settling OSHA and MSHA citations, the legal pitfalls of wellness programs, the elements of an injury and illness prevention program and much more.
Here are just a few highlights:
Olympian Cliff Meidl will offer the keynote address on Wednesday, Oct 30. His topic? The Fire Within. When there is a breakdown in the safety process on a work site, terrible consequences can occur. Meidl experienced those consequences that included his near-electrocution and severe damage to his entire body in a workplace incident. His injuries were so horrific that he faced with the prospect of having both of his legs amputated above the knee. Since suffering this horrific accident in 1986, he has been driven by his "fire within" to become a new person. He will share his tremendous loss and his amazing gain and emphasize the importance of our shared safety mission in a very human and tangible way. His presentation also will include a tribute to those individuals in the audience who are also driven to prevent fatalities and injuries.
On Tuesday, Oct. 29, Dr. Rick Fulwiler will guide attendees in “Achieving World-Class Health & Safety through Transformational Leadership.” According to Fulwiler, leadership can be broken down into two styles – transactional and transformational. A transactional leader focuses on the work while a transformational leader focuses both on the work and the worker. A transactional leader achieves, at best, average results in any functional area. A transformational leader engages the worker and achieve above average results. This is certainly the case when it comes to achieving world-class safety since the key to world class safety is engagement. The learning objectives for this session include:
- Transformational leadership is the key to engaging the work force.
- An engaged work force will achieve above average results in safety and in other important business output areas.
- There are specific skill sets that will lead to one becoming more transformational e.g. listening, communicating, caring, collegiality and engaging.
Another Tuesday session offers a great panel discussion on “The Integration Of Safety Into Your Company's Business/Sustainability Model.” Presenters include former OSHA Administrator Edwin G. Foulke Jr. of Fisher and Phillips; Dusty Ferrell of Georgia Pacific; NIOSH Director John Howard; and Michael Vigezzi of General Electric. In order for any company to achieve world-class safety, its safety program must be integrated into the company’s operations. This session will provide an overview of the challenges facing employers in integrating safety into any company’s business/sustainability model.
The session will focus on best practices to combine safety with production so that they work together as one program. The session will also examine how to achieve upper management buy-in to the integration process. In addition, the session will examine how safety is a positive element that can lead to other improvements within the business. Finally, the session will examine the business case for safety and how safety can achieve profitability and operational excellence when integrated into the company program. Session attendees will:
- Learn the importance of integrating safety into any company’s business/sustainability model.
- Learn how safety and health can achieve operational excellence and profitability when integrated into the company.
- Learn best practices for integrating safety into the company’s business model.
- Learn how integration of safety will improve employee relations and increase employee trust.
For more about the conference and speakers, go to http://www.ascconference.com/.