WASHINGTON (June 7, 2018) – The American Chemistry Council (ACC) honored Ashland LLC with its 2018 Responsible Care® Initiative of the Year Award, in recognition of the company’s “Find It Fix It” initiative, an innovative, interactive employee engagement campaign to drive facility safety.
Ashland launched Find It Fix It during National Safety Month in June 2016 by challenging employees to take selfie snapshots to demonstrate how they are reducing risks in their lives, both in and away from their workplace, to underscore and emphasize each employees’ commitment to living and working safely. Ashland leaders also posted videos to the company’s intranet each week and provided additional examples for employees to consider on their journey to zero incidents.
“One of the cornerstones of Ashland’s Zero Incident Culture is employee engagement,” said Jonathan Scheibe, Life Safety and Lab Safety Program Manager at Ashland. “Ashland challenges employees to take an active role in their safety, both on the job and at home, and this interactive campaign galvanized our community to seek out opportunities and situations where they could apply their training and good judgment to promote a Zero Incident Culture.”
In 2017, Ashland followed up the success of the safety selfie campaign, with a focus on taking action. At work, at customer locations, and at home, employees took before and after photos, to demonstrate how actions were taken or improvements made when hazards existed. Ashland posted photos on a dedicated website and awarded prizes to employees to encourage increased participation – two facility locations in China had 100 percent employee participation.
The campaigns also resulted in sustained annual increases in regular near-miss reporting. From 2015 to 2017, the number of employee-reported incident near-misses increased by nearly 59 percent.
The Find It Fix It initiative grew out of Ashland’s journey to address ergonomic issues – a trends analysis showed that more than 30 percent of Ashland’s global work-related injuries were due to ergonomics. To address this, Ashland used an approach that includes ergonomics training for employees, along with plant assessments. Over the past two years, Ashland facilities around the globe have held 31 on-site events, involving more than 350 employees from various functions, and 71 percent of the issues identified have been resolved or are on schedule for completion.
The Responsible Care Initiative of the Year winner is selected by attendees at the ACC’s annual Responsible Care Conference, who had an opportunity to review submissions from three different companies and talk to company representatives on-site at the event.
In addition to celebrating Responsible Care companies and their achievements, the Responsible Care Conference & Expo provided a forum for more than 300 industry leaders to learn from their peers and other experts in the field about best practices to expand environmental, health, safety and security performance initiatives.