1 million hours worked without safety incidents: How we built a safety-first culture for our manufacturing teams

Across kp, our teams create innovative films and trays that protect medication and medical devices, keep products safe, help avoid food waste and preserve the integrity of countless durable products. We serve more than 8,000 customers using state-of-the-art equipment at our manufacturing plants to make, primarily, rigid plastic film products for conversion, and thermoformed trays.

Given the nature of our business and the equipment used daily, safety is the number one consideration in all our operational decisions, tasks, activities, procedures and programmes.That’s why we were thrilled that kp was recognised in 2024 by the National Safety Council (NSC), based in the US, for achieving one million hours without a lost time accident or illness during the prior year. This milestone confirmed how well our teams have been performing.

Going for that length of time without a reportable incident is no easy task. So, how did we do it?

kp’s safety-first culture

For many, safety culture is often synonymous with ‘the way things are done around here’. At kp, that means all employees and contractors on our sites understand the potential risks that can be involved in our operations and are ready and able to change the way they work to improve safety. It means risk assessment, control and hazard elimination are embedded in all our processes, underpinned by our Group Safety Standards

We have a clear safety mission, and our Group Health and Safety Policy states:

Proactive leadership, behavioural-based safety and continuous improvement of standards will create the environment we need to deliver our mission.
We will conduct operations in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, as well as in conformance with our own Health and Safety policies and procedures.
All safety incidents will be thoroughly investigated by management in a timely manner.
Our culture of positive feedback, collaborative teamwork and the sharing of learnings and best practices will create a learning organisation that does not repeat mistakes.

Prioritising prevention in reality

We’re pleased to say our reality doesn’t deviate from our policy. Across our operations, and at site level, we focus on a handful of what we call proactive KPIs' to ensure we’re on top of safety issues.

These include:

Near miss identification and prevention: historically, near misses have been looked at as a bad thing – essentially, an event that could have caused an injury or incident. In kp, we view near misses as proactive opportunities for improvement and inspire our employees to identify and record any, or as many near misses as they can throughout their shifts. Established and tracked KPIs such as Near Miss Rate and Near Miss Correction Rate allow us to identify where our near misses are occurring, and any trends we are seeing, so we can urgently fix unsafe situations across all our sites.

Daily risk assessments: these give each employee, or team of employees, a window during any part of their work shift time to reflect and to get their head into the task they’re about to undertake, whilst considering safety hazard identification and prevention. When the task they are performing changes, we encourage our employees to take time and perform an additional risk assessment, rather than just doing the task without thinking about the critical safety aspects.

Dynamic risk assessments: for colleagues undertaking a non-standard task, we have a longer assessment. We encourage groups to complete this, to share perspectives and to agree on what the hazards are and what the mitigation controls are. This promotes a stronger line of communication and collaboration across all aspects of the work (for example, Safety, OPS, Maintenance).

Task based risk assessment: an 82-question risk assessment performed by small teams that maps risks on probability, frequency, and severity and assigns a value to that risk. The same questions are asked for every task being assessed, and the required action is linked to the final score.

Behaviour-based safety observations: this is where we effectively audit out complacency, so instead of focusing on the hazards and physical aspects, we’re looking at an individual’s behaviours. Here we track safe and unsafe acts and support colleagues to make improvements in their approach to safety. Not only are these conducted by our management teams, but also our shop floor employees – making this a true peer-to-peer behaviour based safety observation programme.

Safety culture survey: a survey form that focuses on 18 organisational elements of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), each having five levels of safety maturity from “dysfunctional” to “value-creating”. This survey is completed by our operational employees across the sites, recorded, and scored. We then generate high/medium/low impact action items from the results, develop a communication plan that highlights the action items and next steps for site employees, and we share best practice across the company.

We believe excellence requires executive support and employee commitment. It's a combination of shared attitudes. values and behaviours, and the management systems within the organisation. For kp, this is where our sites’ unwavering commitment to excellence and teams’ abilities to consistently meet and exceed our expectations have had a significant impact on our safety success.

External recognition for health and safety performance
kp’s Million Work Hours Award from the NSC, a nonprofit organisation founded in 1913 and chartered by the United States Congress in 1953, confirmed how well our teams have been performing. It recognised we had achieved at least 1 million consecutive work hours* in 2023 without an occupational injury or illness resulting in days away from work. This is a major achievement for any organisation, especially one with manufacturing operations around the world.

kp also reported other record-setting performance last year, picking up an NSC:

Hazard Recognition Award, given to organisations with a hazard recognition programme in place for four or more years, able to demonstrate a steady increase in the percentage of the number of hazards reported and corrected each year. We were able to demonstrate the impact of kp’s Near Miss Reporting Program from 2020-2023.

Occupational Excellence Achievement Award, for organisations with injury and illness records better than or equal to 50% of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for their NAICS code. kp achieved an LTA rate of 0.35 vs. 0.80 for NAICS 326112 in 2023.

Milestone Award, awarded to operations completing a period of 30 or more consecutive days without an occupational injury or illness resulting in days away from work. kp achieved this on two separate occasions: 10/02/23 – 25/04//23 and 01/06/23 – 22/07/23.

All these awards are down to our committed, trained and focused site teams. Whilst we can provide the toolkit, without everyone’s hard work to translate these to site level, this sort of achievement just wouldn’t have been possible.

Health and safety requires a continuing commitment
We know that the best way to deliver the outstanding levels of safety expected of us is to instil a strong safety culture in a safe working environment. We’re lucky to have strong teams and individuals whose attention to detail, and ability to think outside the box, have proven invaluable in solving complex problems and finding innovative solutions for protecting our employees.

As a business, from onboarding an employee, right through until the day they leave us, we also ensure we are continually refreshing their knowledge, and currently offer:

Mandated kp training, and site and local country-regulated training. For example, in North America, our sites use a computer-based training system called SafetySkills, which has over 1,000 different videos on hundreds of topics.

Proactive training: to address any flagged near misses, or focus on site-specific concerns.

We Care Calls; each Tuesday we hold a global call to share best practices, near misses and to foster a learning community.

Safety Days: where sites develop locally relevant programmes, involve external speakers and put the focus on safety mitigation controls. We’ve also covered topics such as mental wellness and sustainability.

kp Academy modules: this is our internal training tool which has health and safety materials embedded.

To have our teams’ work recognised by awards is great – they certainly showcase our commitment - but for me, knowing our employees are going home safe each day is what it’s all about. We’re grateful to work at a company where health and safety doesn’t compete with other priorities – we all know it is non-negotiable. My gratitude goes to all my colleagues who are striving, every day, to ensure that our safety-first culture is the norm.

To find out more about health and safety at kp visit: Risk management systems.

Kyle Hartman
Group EHS Lead, PHD
kp

*For those of you wondering how the calculations work, we take the total number of employees in the company and multiply this by 8 to get 1 days’ worth of hours worked. For 1 years’ worth of total hours, we take the average number of employees over the 12 months and multiply it by 2,080 to get a total amount of hours worked for the year.