Because Murphy-Hoffman Company (MHC Kenworth) is not a traditional over-the-road carrier, employees did not initially view themselves as professional drivers – even though some average over 50,000 miles per year on company business. In 2014, MHC developed a comprehensive vehicle safety program to equip employees with the skills to keep themselves and others safe while driving.
The vehicle safety program has been wildly successful on many levels. Since 2014, MHC has:
- Decreased total liability costs by 78%
- Decreased the number of preventable collisions by 36%
- Decreased our top five coachable driving behaviors by 57% on average
- Increased the number of Safe Driver Award winners by 95%
- Increased the fleet size by 30%
Meet the Other Finalists
Berry Corporation
In 2019, Berry Corporation, an oil and gas company, launched a project to shift the company culture and mindset to "every incident is preventable" and "one incident is one too many." By embracing a "report everything" mindset, Berry’s Health and Safety Team was able to capture precursor events to enable a proactive approach to risk mitigation and corrective action.
For example, workers are required to report all hydrogen sulfide gas exposures, even if the exposure is below the permissible limit and there are no symptoms. Workers must dock and calibrate their personal H2S monitor monthly. Docking stations record all exposure data, even if the worker failed to report the exposure, and email a report to the system administrator with employee name, date, time of exposure, H2S concentration and duration of exposure.
The data identifies low- and high-concentration exposures, and work tasks and equipment settings where exposures are taking place. Operating procedures were updated to minimize or remove the exposure, and equipment was re-engineered to vent to a safe location or eliminate the release of H2S altogether. This resulted in an 80% reduction in exposure frequency companywide.
United States Steel Corporation
U.S. Steel has been dedicated to the pursuit of safety excellence since the early 1900s. However, in the last decade, safety performance plateaued. The company needed a more systematic approach to identifying hazardous jobs and assessing and prioritizing risk, so it developed “risk registers” to identify and assess risks for 7,500 jobs with the highest hazards by the end of 2020.
Teams of subject matter experts came together and used their knowledge to apply a 5x5 risk matrix to assign an initial risk ranking for each job on their risk register. The team tracked and reported their progress throughout 2020, and by year’s end, identified 9,019 jobs that would become the foundation of the new and improved HIRA process - 21% more than initially envisioned.
U. S. Steel achieved record-setting safety performance in 2020. Throughout each plant, all leading and lagging indicator objectives were met or exceeded. Across the company:
- OSHA recordable rates decreased by 12% compared to 2019, ending the year at 0.85
- Significant injury rate fell by 29% compared to 2019
- Days away from work frequency improved by nearly 50%, finishing the year at 0.07
