Engaging employees in the safety agenda

Accidents - Zero Tolerance (AZT) was launched in May 2007 as a catalyst to take Norbord's safety performance to a new level and, five years later, the company has achieved the goal of an OSHA rating of <1.

However, it has also created a new challenge: how to take the safety performance to an even greater level.

Five years ago, Norbord had an OSHA rating of >2, but for Steve Roebuck, human resources director this was not good enough.

He explains: "We had got to a pretty good place in our safety performance through introducing new systems, compliance, physical guarding etc, but we found we'd reached a plateau. "The first job of the AZT working group was to find out what the barriers were to moving forward and that's how we developed the AZT principles: the reshaping of personal responsibility and the changing of perception and risk.

Roebuck said it was a challenging initiative because of scepticism and the lingering perception that safety is up to someone else to fix. However, by developing tools to help employees, engaging them in the safety agenda and keeping the AZT message consistent and continuous, the new safety culture began to take hold.