to deliver safety reminders to employees on the job.
Photo: iStock.com/shotbydave
Work orientations. Tailgate talks. Periodic seminars. These are standard forums for mining and construction operations to deliver safety messages to employees.
But what about smartphones? Seemingly, everyone carries a smartphone, which is capable of sending and receiving text messages. Can smartphones play a role in making employees safer on the job?
The answer is an unequivocal yes according to Ryan Essex, vice president of asphalt, aggregates and production at The Miller Group, a Canadian-based company.
Since 2016, the Miller Group has been connecting with employees with daily texts that touch on a variety of subjects. Many of the messages are safety oriented, offering takeaways that employees can absorb before starting their shifts.
“They like to get the message at about 5 in the morning,” Essex says. “If they’re having a tailgate talk at 6 a.m., the message inevitably gets talked about. It stimulates thought to the reader, but it also stimulates candid conversation in the field.”
Modernizing the platform
The Miller Group didn’t go down this alternate road of promoting safety alone, though. The Miller Group found a partner in Gordon McGuinty, president of Safety Messaging Prioritized, whose company offers a specific platform to educate employees about safety.
McGuinty has worked in the construction and mining industries his whole career, he says. He ventured into safety technology in 2015 after acquiring 4RP Safety from Denis Alarie, former president of Leo Alarie & Sons Construction, who owned the safety technology platform.
After McGuinty acquired 4RP Safety, the platform was modernized.
“Denis made a platform with about 30 different categories containing about 1,000 different safety messages,” McGuinty says. “But he was doing it all by fax.”
McGuinty spent much of 2015 researching how to transition the platform to smartphones. He rewrote some of the platform’s original safety messages, shortening them and conforming them into easy-to-read text messages.
During his research, McGuinty realized safety messages would best be received as part of a broader platform.
“Safety messages get you in the door, but it’s the other messages we integrate in, such as health and wellness, leadership, civility and humor that get people to read,” McGuinty says.
The beauty of the platform is that a company’s employees all receive the same concise message simultaneously, he adds.
“Let’s say you have 10 people on a work crew or 10 people in an office,” McGuinty says. “They’re different ages with different levels of experience. They will each read and get something out of that message differently than another person. It levels the communication.”
Caring for employees
For Essex, the platform presented The Miller Group another mode through which it could communicate with employees. The Miller Group identified several groups within its company to test the platform.
“We have a lot of mobile crews all over Canada,” Essex says. “They now have a daily connection – a daily touch, if you will – from their management team. We feel like that’s really important.”
In addition, safety messages offer another indicator that the company cares about the well-being of its employees.
“It’s nice to wake up and see a message about being safe today,” Essex says. “Then when they go to a work site they can share it with their crew members.”
Before launching the platform at The Miller Group, company representatives developed a plan. The Miller Group has a number of core safety principles expressed in company documents, so those messages were extracted and adapted for use in the platform.
“Those are messages we train from every year,” Essex says. “We pulled out one- and two-liners from the documents. I like to call them ‘the highlights’ to remind people of the important pieces.”
Once a broad-based platform is in place, companies can add messages or make adjustments. When The Miller Group’s construction crews transitioned into winter mode, for example, the focus of the company’s messaging shifted from roadwork to winter conditions, shorter daylight and other timely takeaways.
The platform is also useful in that it gives a company a place to disseminate information quickly should an incident occur.
“If something happens yesterday, we can get that information to Gordon and his team to develop a message that can quickly be shared,” Essex says.
Employees like it
According to Essex, employees of The Miller Group have reacted positively to the platform. In fact, employees now contribute to the messages the company shares. Employees can offer feedback and submit their own messages that The Miller Group can consider for future use.
A Safety Messaging survey of The Miller Group’s employees shows they are highly engaged with the texts. According to the survey, 100 percent of employees who receive messages read them every day. Fifty-six percent discuss messages with colleagues, and 48 percent re-read messages.
In addition, 24 percent of employees discuss the messages with family and friends.
The employees of Nelson Aggregates, another Canadian-based company, are engaged with Safety Messaging similarly. Based on Safety Messaging survey data, engagement among Nelson Aggregates employees is high (92 percent). A high percentage of employees discuss the messages with colleagues (68 percent) and family and friends (64 percent), as well.
Employees at both companies say the messaging platform has increased their awareness of safety issues.
“It’s hard to know if you’ve prevented an accident, but I do feel we’ve had really good safety results,” Essex says. “Our teams are more engaged.”