CHICAGO — Between chemicals, moving parts and steam, drycleaning plants can pose dangers to those who don’t take the time and care to perform their job safely. This culture of safety, however, doesn’t just happen. It requires leadership to make safety a priority.
In Part 1 of this series, we examined where actual risk lives in a drycleaning plant, and explored how using the incident pyramid can stop minor hazards before they grow. In Part 2, we explored OSHA’s most-cited list and the importance of getting employee input on safety. Today, we’ll conclude by looking at how to deal with employees who won’t follow the rules, the financial case for safety and how leaders can get started in creating a culture of safety.
When Someone Won’t Follow the Rules
Every operator eventually runs into an employee who knows the rules and ignores them anyway.
“The most important thing is to stop them from what they’re doing, right then,” says Mike Puppe, general manager of Tiffany Couture Cleaners in Las Vegas. “They get verbally counseled on the spot. If it happens again, it gets documented and put in their file, and at that point they know their job is at risk if it continues.”
Heath Robinson, CSP, ARM, head of safety consulting at World Insurance Associates, calls it progressive accountability and pushes back on the instinct to look past it when a shop is short-staffed.
“The owner has to view that as a business risk, not just a staffing issue,” he says. “Keeping an unsafe employee around can end up costing far more than being short a person. Train them, coach the behavior, issue written discipline and stay consistent with everyone. Termination shouldn’t be the first step. It should be where you land once nothing else has worked.”
Making the Financial Case
For an owner who sees safety spending as a cost rather than an investment, Puppe urges them to do the actual math.
“There are costs to not doing it,” Puppe says. “Workplace injuries mean medical expenses, workers’ comp and lost productivity. Beyond the dollars, a serious incident affects morale across the whole crew, drives up turnover and can damage the company’s reputation.”
Jon Meijer, director of membership at the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI), believes that insurance carriers themselves have a hand in nudging that number.
“Carriers generally send out information about reducing slips and falls and so on,” he says. “It’s a reminder to employees, and it helps reduce issues related to workers’ comp.”
Robinson points to a specific number owners can track: the workers’ compensation experience mod. This is one of the few reliable ways to actually measure something that’s inherently hard to quantify.
“A strong safety program reduces claim frequency and severity, and over time that improves your mod factor,” he says. “For dry cleaners, the average is 1.0. If you’re 20% riskier than average, your mod rate is 1.2, and your insurance costs more. A safe company might run at 0.8 and actually save money.”
Where to Start
So, what should a cleaner do first if they’re serious about building a real culture rather than checking boxes? It comes down to leadership, not paperwork.
“It has to start with the owner getting management on board and explaining why safety matters this much,” Puppe says. “A management team that’s focused on it will build the plan, train on it and enforce it. If management isn’t bought in, the employees never will be either.”
Robinson breaks his advice into three parts: define the non-negotiables, build a simple, documented rhythm of training and reminders, and involve employees in spotting hazards.
“The owner can’t see every hazard in the workplace,” he says. “The person who sees it best is the one working right next to it.”
Meijer points to peer pressure of a healthier kind. DLI members compare notes on weekly calls, and the ones with the strongest cultures tend to be the ones paying closest attention.
“They’re pretty in tune with what they need to do to maintain a culture of safety,” he says. “Our members really do try hard to protect their employees.”
He also sees the bar rising across the industry, not just among DLI’s members: “It’s more of an issue than it was 20 years ago, without a doubt. There’s so much more attention on workplace safety now, and people are a lot more vocal about it than they used to be.”
For Puppe, the payoff is quieter than a compliance certificate.
“Safety culture is right there in the name. It’s not a one-man thing or a one-woman thing,” he says. “Everybody has to embrace it and feel comfortable reporting, because if that’s not happening, it’s never making it up to the owner. And if you don’t know about it, how do you fix it?”
For Part 1 of this series, click HERE. For Part 2, click HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
