Page 65 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Safety isn’t about stats and savings anymore. It’s about people’s lives. We care about our people. We want them to be safe. And we want them to go home to their fami- lies every night and enjoy their lives.
– Erin Sorgel, CFO, Peterson-Cat
for their actions. That technician was doing his job, because we’ve empowered employees to speak up, in a professional and respectful way, when they see something unsafe. By holding each other account- able and responsible for our safety, it helps enforce our overall safety culture. And that all boils down to this: Safety begins with me.”
SERIOUS INCIDENT REVIEW COMMITTEE (SIRC)
At the end of 2018, Peterson established a post-in- cident review process to investigate what hap- pened and how we could learn from it. According to Malerie Carr, it has made a big difference. “The committee is made up of the safety team, Stephan [Zalesky] and the upper management group in charge of the person involved in a serious incident, even if nobody got hurt. We have the employee explain what happened and then the manager is responsible to explain what they’ve come up with as a recommendation for improving the process, or corrective actions. It’s not about disciplining the employee. It’s about what happened and what are we going to do as a company to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The best part of the process is that the employees are directly involved with creating the process changes.”
STATISTICS BUILD SAFETY
Peterson’s safety journey has evolved quite a bit over the past five years. From 2016 until year-end 2019, Peterson ranked 37th in Safety, out of the 44 North American Cat dealers. “We had 56 record- able injuries in 2019,” says Zalesky concerning the RIF’s (recordable incident frequency) that Cat measures its dealers on. “In 2020, we had 27 re- cordables, which was a 50 percent reduction. And that’s because of all the safety protocols we’ve put in place, but most of all, everyone is being much more safety-minded.”
A software program called EHS has enabled the company to track the numbers and types of inju- ries and put that data to good use quickly. For in- stance, 40 percent of all injuries were hand injuries, with lacerations being the largest category. After doing some research and analysis, they came up with the Glove Policy. “We actually already had a glove policy in place, but after digging into the fig- ures, we added to it,” says Zalesky. “Now if you’re in a safety-sensitive role, which would be parts and service and rental, you need to wear at least Cut Level 2 resistance gloves. That means if you
Above: Images from a video the Safety team put together to encourage safety-awareness
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