Innovating to Improve Safety
While we are proud to have reduced our recordable workplace injuries by 57 percent since 2008, our ultimate goal is to have zero injuries. Our priority is to provide a safe workplace free of recognized hazards and engage our employees in leading safety activities that help anticipate and prevent potential accidents.
To continue to reduce recordable injuries at Domtar, we remain focused on eliminating the combination of precursors that occur prior to an incident before a significant event occurs.
Domtar’s safety professionals, for example, have identified eight key operations across our mill system with the most potential injury risk, then developed a standard operating procedure for each so they’re done the same way at every mill. The teams even built in measures to track each process’ effectiveness, including regular check-ins to verify the work that’s actually performed matches the work as outlined in the standard process (and then takes the necessary measures to addresses any deviations).
Safety isn’t the absence of injuries or events, it’s the presence of proactive, preventative barriers that result a safe workplace.
Partnering for Safety
Employee engagement is crucial to promoting safe behavior. Domtar’s Right and Responsibility to Act policy allows and expects our employees to step in and intervene if they judge work to be unsafe. Empowering our employees to work safely isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do.
At Domtar, we can only drive our safety culture forward if each employee is committed to active involvement in every aspect of employee safety. Our philosophy in this area is rooted in the teachings of the Human Performance Improvement methodology, which considers the entire organization after an injury – not just a single individual – in attempting to understand the context surrounding an event.
We have the right people with the right behaviors and the right processes in place, and our results show what we are capable of achieving when all of our employees work together.
