Empowering employees and supporting safety

Cook Vandergrift awarded the Safety Excellence award

For Andrew Clevenger, the Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) manager for Cook Vandergrift, creating an environment where employees feel empowered is an important aspect of having a safety program.

“I think in terms of the employee, when they feel empowered, they are far more likely to be happy with their job and, perhaps more importantly, more apt to be safe at work,” Andrew said.

Andrew has been with Cook Vandergrift in this position for almost five years and he is responsible for overseeing all of the facility’s health and safety matters. According to Andrew, as a primarily manufacturing-based facility, Cook Vandergrift sees safety issues arise in the form of repetitive motion, poor posture, people reporting back pain and wrist pain, etc.

Embracing improvement opportunities

Recently, the Doppler Manufacturing team at Cook Vandergrift embraced opportunities to improve health and safety in their department by holding a safety meeting each morning. The topics covered in this meeting include the previous day’s safety performance, such as near misses or injuries that occurred. On a weekly basis, a supervisor in the department gives the group a brief safety training on a relevant topic. The two supervisors in the department also complete at least two safety observations per month for EH&S to review. According to Teresa Barrett, supervisor for Doppler Manufacturing, these safety initiatives are important for a few reasons. Aside from the fact that they can help prevent employees from getting hurt, they also help the team to be more aware of their surroundings and allow for them to bring any potential safety issues to management’s attention.

It was the implementation of these activities that won Doppler Manufacturing the Safety Excellence award for the second quarter of 2021. The Safety Excellence award recognizes a department within a Cook Group company every quarter for exemplary performance and leadership within health and safety. The award is based on leading indicators, and encourages a proactive assessment of workplace injury risks.

“This daily management process is still a work in progress, and we are fine-tuning things as we go,” Andrew said. “I think any sort of recognition for the right things is great, and this has definitely been something that was received very well within the department.”

“They were excited,” Teresa added. “They greatly appreciated that we were up for an award like that.”

Tina Vagnozzi is an assembler for the team, making the probe and cables for the Doppler device. She was excited to learn that she and her colleagues had received the Safety Excellence award.

“We always try to do safe things safely and if we see something that is unsafe we always tell Teresa, and we get it fixed,” Tina said.

Good safety practices and company values

According to Will Lehman, Corporate Risk and Insurance manager, good safety practices align with Cook’s values.

“Safety excellence begins with doing the right thing & taking care of our employees,” Will said. “If we are living by our company values, we should be continuing to have these discussions on why safety matters & encouraging others to implement proactive safety initiatives.”

Will has been with the Corporate Risk and Insurance team for six years and recently took on the role as manager. The work that this team is responsible for falls into a few different buckets, but one of these specific buckets is functional risk management. According to Will, this involves collaborating with the different functions and entities across Cook to achieve their goals and mitigate risk, which is where the Safety Excellence award comes in.

“We are collaborating with EH&S on goals to reduce the frequency and severity of workplace injuries,” Will said. “We have launched several new across the organization to support these goals.”

Will’s team holds a monthly safety call with all of the US Cook Group sites to provide a collaboration opportunity and to share best practices from a safety perspective across all of the sites involved. The discussions range from incidence and corrective actions to safety projects and initiatives. Will said the idea of having an award came up as a sidebar conversation with the new director of EH&S at Cook Inc., Kyle Kerber, and about how they could reward proactive safety efforts based on leading indicators.

The nomination process

Every US Cook Group company has an opportunity to nominate a department at their site to be a recipient of the Safety Excellence award. At the end of the quarter, during the monthly safety call, a representative of each site is given a chance to explain their nomination. Then attendees are able to vote on who they feel should receive the award, using a Webex poll.

“It is an opportunity for all of the sites and all of their Safety team members to get involved and vote,” Will said, “which I think helps everyone feel empowered, but it also speaks to the award. It was voted on by all of the Safety professionals at Cook Group sites across the US.”

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