Superior Linen Service Celebrates Significant Safety Milestone

Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Russell Holt, chief compliance officer at Superior Linen Service, Tulsa, OK. Holt has long been active in TRSA, currently serving on the association’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Committee. He previously served as the chair of TRSA’s Safety Committee.

I’m proud of our Eastern Division’s impressive safety achievement. This year marked their ninth straight year without having a lost-time accident.

I know we do not have the best safety program in the industry, nor do we have the worst, but what we do have in the Springdale plant is the Holy Grail of safety excellence: we have a good safety culture, and when a company creates a good safety culture, that is when things come together.

We have all heard the adage: To have an excellent safety program, you must have leadership buy-in. In my many years of doing this job, I’ve seen some companies that had much more robust safety programs than ours, and their management team knew all the right words to say, but their culture was lacking because some of these companies would put production over safety, which were actions that the employees saw that spoke louder than the leader’s words. As we all know, employees follow management’s lead. Here in our Springdale plant, they say what they are going to do and do what they say, and that congruency and consistency of word and deed helps drive their safety culture.

Although there are many aspects to creating a safety culture, and there is no one silver bullet that can ensure success, there are two things that come to my mind that the Eastern Division does that helps them cultivate their safety culture: one, they are passionate about the behavior-based safety program, and two, the general manager merged their staff and safety meetings into one meeting.

First is the Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) program, which is the glue that helps hold our safety culture together. Although BBS has always been my pet program, I have learned that if I want to introduce someone to the program, it’s best if I introduce them to the Eastern Division’s Plant Manager, Korina Alvarez, who does a much better job of explaining it than I do.

I never tire of watching Korina explain the BBS program to her employees. Her passion and cut-to-the-chase way of explaining the program informs both the new and more senior employees about the importance of the program while she inspires them to take part in the process.

She has a goal of 100% participation in BBS observations weekly. That means each employee will conduct one BBS observation per week, either in their department or one of the other departments in the plant. To her credit, her production department is averaging 98% participation for the year, which, based on my 18 years of doing this job, is outstanding and is one of the key driving factors behind their safety culture.

The second thing that helps drive the safety culture is that Ronny Luthi, general manager of the Eastern Division, has combined the safety meetings with his staff meetings. The meetings seamlessly tie everything together; safety is not siloed as a separate department but is woven into everything they do. At this location, every manager’s duty is to ensure each employee in their charge goes home injury-free, and that message, which starts at the top, ripples throughout the organization.

Having no lost-time accidents is a testament to managing preventative programs that keep accidents at a minimum or, at the very least, reduce the potential for severe accidents. However, accidents do still happen, yet when they do, they are minor. Proof of that is the fact that this plant’s OSHA Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) and Days Away from Work, Days of Restricted Activity, and Days Transferred Rate (DART) constantly stay way below industry standards.

Again, I want to congratulate Superior Linen Service’s Eastern Division on nine years of no lost-time accidents. With a lot of hard work and a little luck, I’m sure they will celebrate ten years with no lost-time accidents next year.