Home Safe and Well – a powerful pledge

OneFortyOne’s company-wide Home Safe and Well vision is a strong commitment to wellbeing.

OneFortyOne New Zealand has made a powerful demonstration of this commitment by inviting team members, including contractors visiting the company’s sites, to sign a pledge.

The programme invites team members, including contractors visiting the company’s sites, to sign a pledge. A poster containing their signatures will then be laminated and displayed prominently at OneFortyOne New Zealand’s Kaituna Sawmill and its Nelson office. People who have signed have also received a badge to wear to indicate they have endorsed the pledge.

“The pledge is to ourselves, to our families, and to one another. It’s a way of signalling to everyone that we are working towards our common goal of doing all the things in our control to go home safe and well every day,” says Executive General Manager New Zealand, Lees Seymour.

Implementing Home Safe and Well is an important part of a broader focus on safety culture and engagement to improve health and safety across the whole company, says Lees.

“Our goal is that everybody goes home safe and well at the end of the working day and that’s a very achievable goal.”

Kaituna Sawmill has been doing a great deal of work in the health and safety area over recent years and has been identifying and mitigating critical risks on site such as safety around forklifts. Lees says that while holding themselves to account is important, recognition of good work is also crucial.

During the Home Safe and Well launch at Kaituna Sawmill in January 2020 the team were asked to identify the best changes they had seen in health and safety in the past 6-12 months. People were quick to identify a range of positive steps that had been taken, including improved fencing, guarding and walkways, better control of where trucks and truck drivers could be within the log yard and true engagement from leadership in terms of investing money, time and support into health and safety initiatives. There were also plenty of ideas flowing freely when it came to discussing things that could still be done to improve health and safety measures.

Green Mill Manager Chris Lambert says that he has seen a great improvement in safety at the sawmill during his 20 years working at the site and he is particularly impressed with the leadership being shown through the implementation of the Home Safe and Well programme.

“It’s driven from the top and it was good the way it was communicated with Lees visiting the mill to talk to everyone in person. Asking for examples of good work that’s been happening and ongoing frustrations gave everybody the opportunity to bring up some things. The most important thing, I feel, for the guys in the mill was that Lees was there and made it clear that he cares about safety. If he cares about it, it’s going to happen.”

The team at the mill are continuing to look at ways to reduce and eliminate critical risks, to record what they’re doing and to encourage a culture that keeps themselves and contractors visiting the site safe, says Kaituna Sawmill General Manager Tracy Goss. “We need people working together to make this happen,” says Tracy.