I work for an agribusiness-related company.  Our safety program is pretty much non-existant since they've been without a dedicated HR professional.  After meeting with our Loss Control Specialist, I've become a little more comfortable with getting a new program off the ground.  As far as I'm aware we don't have a safety committee and probably should work first to get one established.  How did your company go about picking employees to be members and how often do you meet for meetings?  We have about 130 employees and are spread out across the country...

gi_janearng:

I work for an agribusiness-related company.  Our safety program is pretty much non-existant since they've been without a dedicated HR professional.  After meeting with our Loss Control Specialist, I've become a little more comfortable with getting a new program off the ground.  As far as I'm aware we don't have a safety committee and probably should work first to get one established.  How did your company go about picking employees to be members and how often do you meet for meetings?  We have about 130 employees and are spread out across the country...

I never really thought about this before but I wonder how picking a safety committee (something about which I know nothing) might interact with the prohibition on company dominated unions.

Good question.  I've never seen that brought up.  I've had people tell me that they've posted notice for volunteers; I've read elsewhere about involving all employees which I'm balking at because of the fact we're not in a centralized location.  We have a 401(k) committee and also a benefits committee which consists of a rep from all our departments, so I'm not sure how much difference there would be in one for safety? 

gi_janearng:

Good question.  I've never seen that brought up.  I've had people tell me that they've posted notice for volunteers; I've read elsewhere about involving all employees which I'm balking at because of the fact we're not in a centralized location.  We have a 401(k) committee and also a benefits committee which consists of a rep from all our departments, so I'm not sure how much difference there would be in one for safety? 

 

I think all such committees have the potential for CDU problems but iirc, it's highly context sensitive.

We asked managers to designate a representative from their area to be on the Safety Committee.  We don't get many volunteers when we try to fill committees that way.  We initially started meeting once a week, then went to monthly, now quarterly.

The last company I worked for was the same way. I had over 500 employees and only 5 wanted to be on the safety team. The first thing you can do is post a sign up sheet for your safety team. We had meetings every week and did a saftey walk once a month. Make sure you have a lead besides yourself just in case you have to miss a meeting that way they can still meet weekly even if your not able to. If you come across where you dont have anyone that wants to participate then what I did was made my Dept. managers attend until they had someone from their area that wanted to be on the team. The biggest problem I had was no one took it serious not even the managers so you have to get the supervisors on board so your employees will take it serious. Good Luck!