Quarry Operator Transforms Safety Culture and Employee Engagement
Crushed Rock & Other Aggregate Materials | Multiple Locations | 250-300 Employees
Previous lagging indicator incentive systems experienced low effectiveness and created concerns about potential injury hiding. They wanted an improved safety culture and to create employee ownership of safety.
The Challenge
The company was using a traditional, lagging-indicator safety incentive program that leaders rated only 4 out of 10 in effectiveness. The program was used before OSHA's 2016 ruling about lagging indicator incentive programs and was designed to reward employees with cash if their team remained injury-free for a set period of time. But management had ongoing concerns about potential injury hiding, making it difficult for the organization to fully integrate incentives as a safety tool.
Leadership recognized the need to strengthen safety culture and build greater employee ownership of safety across the workforce. As a mining company, they have to meet the standards of both OSHA and MSHA (Mine Safety & Health Administration), the latter of which has particular compliance standards that they had been penalized for in the past. They wanted to promote consistent, thorough workplace examinations that could identify hazards and reduce risk before incidents occurred.
SmartCard® Focus: Reinforcement & Recognition
Working alongside the safety team, we helped leaders identify the behaviors that prevent incidents and align the program around these priorities:
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Implement a behavior-based safety incentive program compliant with MSHA regulations that reinforces compliance standards.​
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Improve reporting of potential safety issues.
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Increase employee engagement with safety across teams and company locations.
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Enhance manager-employee relationships around safety with intentional, daily positive reinforcement.
Behavior Change in Action
0 MSHA Violations
97% Engagement
"Less than a year after we began working with this client, one of their senior managers called to tell us that they had an MSHA inspection and his team had zero citations! The MSHA inspector had even stayed there for 3 days to try and find a violation. But this manager's team had spent 9 months looking for citation violations and fixing them as they went. That became their culture.
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That manager also remarked that he could only remember this happening once before. This was just the first of many such MSHA inspections with zero citations we've been privileged to celebrate with this client. If they see something, they say something, and the manager doesn't see it as an extra burden– he thanks his team for bringing it to his attention."
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– Bonnie Sims, CFO for the Bill Sims Company, Inc.
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"Our engagement has been great... I think it motivates our employees and reinforces them to always do the right thing in terms of safety. It builds that manager-employee relationship which then motivates our employees. They're more productive. They're safer. And the morale overall has increased."
– Company HR Leader