“We didn’t want them on board, even if they had 10 or 20 years’ experience, if they couldn’t accept safety as a core value. We put some policies in place that people didn’t like, but we want them to be safe, to automatically do it,” says Brown.
Bremen Castings Inc. is a family-owned foundry and machine shop and founded in 1939 in Bremen, Ind. In a job where employees deal with heavy, hot molten iron, there undoubtedly are added dangers, but Bremen Casting is seeing a dramatic decrease in injuries thanks to the added safety measures put into place,
“We want employees to become the same way about safety that professional athletes think about golf or football; to do it automatically,” says Brown. To get employees to that point in their safety efforts, Bremen Castings has instituted a number of new programs and policies.
- Safety is the first thing discussed in daily production meetings.
- All injury-causing or loss-related accidents and incidents and near misses require a report that is emailed to the entire management team. These reports include incidents – such as a non-work-related seizure – that occur on site.
- Bremen believes all employees are members of the safety team providing a better root cause and corrective action. Employees are asked about their safety concerns, and those concerns are addressed by supervisors and management.
- All departments have a weekly safety audit where they are scored from someone trained outside that department. They even go so far as to rate the housekeeping staff on their safety.
- A toolbox talk each month covers OSHA-mandated training topics.
- Every Monday, employees have a 15-minute safety pep talk, and pep talks are the first thing on the agenda when employees return from holidays and 3-day weekend.
And in the hot summer months, Bremen cools workers off, around the clock, with an ample supply of free freezer pops. “This is a hot environment, and we’ve had some overheats,” says Tricia Endsley, the health and safety manager at Bremen.
