Employee Injury Prevention Management System (EIPMS) is the foundation of Smithfield’s ongoing success in reducing injury and illness rates. EIPMS was initially developed from Occupational Health and Safety Assessment System (OHSAS) 18001, and supplemented by the American National Standards Institute’s Z10 standard and OSHA Voluntary Protection Program guidelines. EIPMS establishes an organized, process-oriented, and proactive methodology for injury prevention. Smithfield regularly updates and revises the EIPMS, resulting in continually improved health and safety management guidelines.
EIPMS implementation is required of all operations, including farms, feed mills, and processing plants. The system is designed to minimize potential risks to employees and others, improve business performance, and enhance relationships within the marketplace. With a strong focus on the well-being of employees, the program opens communication among our independent operating companies (IOCs) and facilitates the sharing of best practices.
Under EIPMS guidelines, each wholly owned or subsidiary facility must do the following:
- Develop and maintain effective safety operating control measures and training programs;
- Set safety management targets; measure progress against trusted performance metrics;
- Create protocols to identify and control potential risks;
- Develop and update emergency action plans;
- Establish, document, and communicate responsibilities for all relevant staff;
- Identify nonconformance, accidents, and near misses to prevent future incidents; and
- Assess the management system for improvement opportunities on a regular basis.
Smithfield outperforms OSHA benchmarks for the meatpacking industry, and we have continued to demonstrate year-over-year performance improvements. Now in our fourth year of EIPMS implementation, we are seeing even more impressive gains. (See chart in Health & Safety Performance.)
LEARN MORE Behavioral Risk Improvement ProcessAs our processes improve, we assess our EIPMS programs to determine where we may push for further improvement. These efforts include regular reviews of company scorecards, an annual management review of the entire EIPMS system, and an evaluation of health and safety performance at each location. Each month, individual locations report progress toward objectives and management plans on a number of metrics. These include work order completion, training completed, machinery and equipment inspections, physical inspections involving senior management, formal employee engagement, and injury and illness rates. These activities and performance are also discussed during each IOC’s weekly operations management conference calls. The outcomes of these reports are also compiled into a scorecard to be reviewed by the most senior-level management of each operating company and the president and CEO of Smithfield Foods. In addition to the monthly scorecards, audit results are passed up the chain of command for further action where appropriate.
Safety Training and Employee Engagement
All Smithfield employees complete health and safety training upon hire. Training is conducted in English and in other languages where appropriate. In addition to new employee training, ongoing safety-related training continues regularly throughout an employee’s career at Smithfield. Workplaces conduct ongoing training in emergency plans, ergonomics, control of hazardous energy, chemical safety, personal protective equipment, hearing conservation, chemical hazard communication, control of hazardous energy, machine guarding, elevated work, mobile equipment, and other general safety policies and procedures. Many locations have mentoring programs that allow employees to discuss safety issues with and learn techniques from experienced staff. Additional training is conducted to meet safety targets as employees advance into specialized occupations, such as process safety management, hot work procedures for cutting, welding, and grinding, electrical safety, confined space entry, and others. Employee training and engagement activities are discussed at each IOC's weekly operations conference call and are recorded as part of our new monthly safety scorecard tracking system, as well as in annual audits.
Each IOC also has minimum training guidelines for managers and supervisors. Smithfield recently standardized the guidelines for continued health and safety education hours for all managers, supervisors, and safety professionals to maintain a higher degree of understanding and proficiency in managing health and safety related matters and processes.
In 2010, Smithfield Foods spent $3.9 million to train about 37,400 employees in the United States. These employees underwent a total of nearly 300,000 hours of training, or approximately eight hours per individual.
Smithfield Foods encourages employee engagement at all levels of the organization. We find that active engagement in formal safety processes improves health and safety program effectiveness. We work to increase employee engagement in safety activities, encouraging employee participation in safety program reviews and development of new systems. Many locations maintain employee safety teams focused on ergonomics, emergency response and evacuation planning, incident investigations, health and safety awareness, hazardous energy isolation, machine guarding, chemical awareness, mobile equipment, personal protective equipment, and safety awards and recognition.
Approximately 21 percent of our total workforce is represented in formal engagement activities including worker health and safety committees, investigation teams, and equipment and facility inspections. These joint committees also lead specialized training, provide policy and procedures updates, monitor operational controls, and coordinate evacuation drills. Consistent with our sustainability targets for each facility, we are working toward involving a greater percentage of employees to provide consistency across the organization and expand the benefits of employee engagement.
Over 100 Smithfield safety professionals, as well as management personnel from operations, engineering, and maintenance, attended the 2010 Safety Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. This year’s conference focused on various elements of EIPMS and operational controls. For example, conference participants received training from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and other health, safety, and security consultants on community safety issues around chemicals and chemical processes.
Tracking Our Efforts
Each Smithfield location formally documents the safety-related activities and number of hourly employees involved, as part of a new monthly Health and Safety Performance scorecard. This monthly scorecard tracks each location’s performance across nine metrics. Three are performance metrics; the other six measure specific activities in which personnel, hourly employees, and management must be engaged to sustain reduced employee injury and illness. Each metric has a facility target (e.g., a certain percentage completion of EIPMS objectives and management plans and health and safety work orders by targeted dates, completion of worksite safety inspections, and full senior management participation in safety tours) that must be reported against each month. Senior-level management at Smithfield and each of the IOCs assess each scorecard, and promote continuous improvement by recognizing facilities with the strongest performance results and by fostering competition among locations across the organization.
To enhance the EIPMS, Smithfield tracks conformance to operational control requirements associated with high-risk hazards such as lockout/tagout, machine guarding, confined space entry, process safety management, emergency action plans, elevated work, electrical safety, and contractor safety.
Auditing and Inspections
We have improved injury rates due in large part to our EIPMS and auditing process. Each facility has an in-house audit program that evaluates whether its EIPMS is effective. The EIPMS audit focuses on hazard identification and injury prevention, supplemented with an overview of regulatory compliance. These efforts help us identify hazards and risks, and help us develop injury prevention solutions before our employees are subject to unnecessary risks.
At all facilities, we audit for operational controls such as training, machine and tool safety, personal protective equipment, chemical safety, hearing conservation, emergency planning and response, as well as employee engagement. Facilities that perform well are encouraged to share their best practices with other sites. Those that show poor results are expected to correct their practices and are subject to more frequent audits. Failure to improve audit scores results in increased involvement from the director of health and safety and higher-level corporate leaders, if necessary, to facilitate improvement.
As we strive for continued improvement, we have implemented EIPMS and operational control requirements that are more stringent than regulatory statutes require. Audits and assessments conducted in 2010 continue to identify opportunities for health and safety improvements with employee training, enhanced control measures for certain types of injuries, and improved investigations for nonconformances that do not result in injuries or property damage, among others. These audits and assessments also identify best practices that can be shared across the organization.
These site-specific audits are complemented by annual audits conducted by teams trained and led by Smithfield-certified lead auditors. Our auditors and director of corporate safety regularly assess our domestic facilities for compliance with OSHA and company-specific safety policies. The findings of each audit are scored, documented, and shared with site operations, safety managers, and senior management at the subsidiary and corporate level. We use the first year of audits as a baseline and require annual improvement in the following years.
In addition to the EIPMS audit process, Smithfield undergoes thorough external audits of compliance and hazard control programs at our U.S. worksites on a revolving schedule. These audits, led by independent, third-party personnel with experience in the meatpacking industry, complement the management systems audits through in-depth examination of worksites’ control of injury and illness hazards.
Ergonomics
In 2011, Smithfield Foods required all operations with risk of musculoskeletal injury and illness to develop and implement new ergonomic control measures. Each ergonomics program outlines specific steps and elements of the location’s ergonomics process, including operational targets, action plans related to reduction of ergonomic risk, and the assigning of individuals accountable for coordination and support. Locations must also establish an interdisciplinary team representing key functions (safety, operations, maintenance, and engineering) tasked with identifying and reducing ergonomic risks. Other employees will be involved through ergonomics trainings, a suggestion system, employee surveys, participation in ergonomics teams, and regular roundtable discussions.
As an organization, we track ergonomic-related incidents as part of our overall hazard and risk assessment process; however, we do not report these injuries separately from overall injury and illness rates.
Return to Work
Traditional programs typically bring employees back to light work after an injury, but fail to transition them to full regular work. In 2009, Smithfield began developing a pilot Return to Work (RTW) program. Smithfield established a goal to improve medical care and return every injured employee, whenever possible, to full and regular work as soon as practicable. We developed a formal procedural manual to help guide the process and fully implemented it in 2010.
This past year, Smithfield Foods introduced our Workers’ Compensation Claims Management and RTW program, providing guidance to workers’ compensation coordinators for reporting claims and suggestions for enhanced management techniques. Our program requires all necessary departments to work as a team to make sure that all claims are reported quickly and managed in a manner that provides the best care for the injured worker.
To ensure program elements are appropriately implemented, we regularly monitor and report outcomes in a separate scorecard that is reviewed during our internal audit process.
Behavioral Risk Improvement Process
Workplace safety programs have historically focused on conditions and processes. To make conditions safer, companies implement equipment changes, such as machine guards, handrails, and other physical measures. At the same time, they look for ways to institute process changes—requiring workers to wear safety glasses or steel-toed boots, for example—to improve the overall environment for employees. Companies also publish regulations and provide training so workers understand the safety rules and know when—and how—to apply them.
Yet, even with proper equipment, tools, and far-reaching rules and regulations, most workplace injuries occur because employees take unnecessary risks. We believe that to further improve our safety performance, we must focus on changing individual employee behavior. That is why we recently implemented a Behavioral Risk Improvement (BRI) process at two facilities in St. Charles, Illinois, and Dennison, Iowa, with the intention of helping our employees make safety a matter of habit. In this system, hourly employees are encouraged by management to observe each other and help make safe decisions. The goal is to identify opportunities where small but important changes in behavior can reduce or eliminate risk of injury. BRI also provides another avenue for employees to bring issues of concern to management for analysis. Through peer-to-peer employee observation, the BRI process helps identify and reinforce safe behaviors, while providing feedback on a daily basis.
In late 2010, a third facility began implementing the BRI process in Omaha, Nebraska. BRI facilitators at our Springfield, Massachusetts, and Sioux City, Iowa, facilities have been trained in preparation for implementation in 2012. Smithfield’s internal BRI consultants will also complete final certification in early 2012 and will be positioned to implement BRI as the program expands.
Over the past year, BRI has resulted in more than 735,000 peer-to-peer observations, raising awareness and improving personal accountability for all employees. Our data indicate that BRI has helped to reduce injury and illness rates by 23 percent at the two plants where we have implemented the process.
