ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Mission Linen Supply’s Eureka, California, laundry facility is the recipient of the 2015 SafeTRSA Innovation Award, having achieved above-average workplace safety and inspired better such performance at laundry plants throughout the Mission operation in the Western United States.
Dennis Pieper, general manager of the Eureka plant, accepted the honor Sept. 11, 2015 at TRSA’s Annual Conference in Isle of Palms, South Carolina.
Safety efforts at the Eureka facility are under the watchful eye of a six-person team that meets regularly with engineering and management to identify concerns throughout the operation. The team gathers feedback from and communicates with employees, posting Safety Scoreboards daily across the plant. Such communication, as well as recognizing and rewarding safety achievements, drives behavior modification needed to improve safety.
The team’s plant-specific efforts facilitated total recordable (TRIR) and lost workday (DART) rates below the industry average, as well as achievement of 923 consecutive working days with no lost-time incidents. This performance won recognition as Mission’s Plant of the Year for safety in 2013 and 2014. The facility’s outstanding results led to new company-wide policies and procedures that sparked revisions to Mission’s training, improving overall corporate safety. Employees have embraced the operation’s motto, “Practice safety every second of every minute of every day in both our business and personal lives.”
TRSA’s Safety Committee selects the winner of the SafeTRSA Innovation Award to recognize a company or facility that has implemented novel approaches to improving safety with quantifiable results. The winner must demonstrate support from management, employee involvement, training and good communication. SafeTRSA is TRSA’s website portal for safety training resources, providing class outlines, exercises, tests and reference materials to members at no charge to tackle some of the industry’s most difficult challenges.
