Safety First: Our Shared Responsibility

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At S&C, where we’re empowering people to transform the grid, we’re also empowering our team members to maintain a safe workplace. Our goal is a recordable injury-free workplace, and that starts with a safety-first mindset.

Safety is a team sport at S&C. We all depend on each other to uphold our safety-first mindset across our organization, from the manufacturing floor to the C-suite.

This culture of shared responsibility drives the mindset and behaviors needed to achieve zero injuries. As a large engineering and industrial manufacturing company, the nature of our work presents the potential for safety risks. We combat this by integrating safety into who we are as an employer. We approach safety from every angle; we’re constantly testing new programs, adjusting our methods, and, of course, tracking our progress to identify more opportunities for improvement.

Recently we’ve created a slogan to help drive a safety-first mindset: if you see something, say something and, most importantly, DO something. We highlight this at every opportunity, including in the safety briefings that happen at the beginning of every manufacturing shift.

With this foundational language, we put safety at the forefront of each team member’s mind any time they are at work. Safety comes before productivity at S&C, which empowers our team members to stop work if they see something with even the potential to create a safety hazard. When team members draw attention to something that could be a safety risk, they are praised and rewarded for contributing to our safety-first culture.

Creating this shared language around safety is the foundation of the safety-first mindset we instill in our team members. But we also have several hands-on programs that position safety as our shared responsibility. One of our longest standing safety programs is our Safety Action Teams (SATs).

All team members have the opportunity, on a rotating basis, to serve on an SAT for their department, unit, or division. The SATs complete monthly “Go-and-See” inspections to find and address safety concerns, organize safety awareness and promotion campaigns, conduct accident/incident investigations, execute safety audits, and carry out key safety projects. Our 14 SATs drive team member engagement by directly involving team members in the identification and remediation of potential safety risks.   

In addition to grassroots safety efforts driven by team members, we also involve our most senior leaders in our safety programs. C-level leaders regularly conduct “Go-and-See” observations to get firsthand experience with our safety programs, and in the manufacturing environment. Production leaders also have a goal of completing safety observations each month to drive continuous improvement of our manufacturing areas.

We are growing rapidly at S&C, and as we do so we remain steadfastly committed to instilling a safety-first mindset in our team members, especially those new to manufacturing. I’m proud of our culture of caring and how that translates into our goal of being an injury-free workplace. As we deliver on our mission of creating an outage-free, sustainable electrical energy future, keeping one another safe will remain our number one priority.