January 4, 2021 – K. Graney Podcast: Staying Safe in 2021

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Hi everyone this is Kevin. Today is January 4th, 2021. Happy New Year and welcome back! I hope you had a safe and restful holiday break.

To kick off 2021, I’d like to focus on our #1 priority—keeping ourselves and our fellow employees safe.  Just like last year, we have set a high standard that no injuries are acceptable at Electric Boat. While we’ve made significant progress in 2020 with our best ever OSHA recordable incident and lost work day rates—and I thank you for your commitment to working safely—we are not yet the safest shipyard in the country. Period. We can become the safest shipyard in our business by adopting what we’re calling a Total Safety Culture. A Total Safety Culture is something that was developed at NASSCO that drove them to achieve industry-leading safety performance over several years. A Total Safety Culture is focused on accountability at every level of our organization. It is not driven across EB by the management team telling people to “be safe.” It is driven by all of the employees because each employee understands the behaviors that result in working injury free and in ensuring we hold ourselves and each other accountable to a standard for safety. A Total Safety Culture requires active participation by each of us because we have made safety a habit.

To start, we’ll need to work on enhancing our safety awareness and focus—identifying those behaviors that are risky and more likely to lead to injury.  It’s easy to fall into bad habits or not “see” risks that have become part of the background, especially if you’ve been doing something a certain way for a long time.  For this reason, we’re launching Safe Worker and Safe Supervisor programs to help people identify risky behaviors and constructively change. We’re also creating a Safe Room training facility in the Groton shipyard and at Quonset Point as well. This room will be set up with a variety of safety challenges for people to identify—i.e., people should be able to enter this room and identify  “what’s wrong here?” If we all know what safe “looks like,” we can do a better job in making sure our work environment is set up for success.

We’re also committing to doubling the Safe Site Audits we conduct at the Groton shipyard and Quonset Point facility by the end of 2021. A Safe Site audit evaluates an area within our facility and assigns a letter “grade” based on established criteria that could include housekeeping, line and lead control, fire extinguisher maintenance, among many others. This process also helps train our Operations leaders on what a safe work site looks like and ensures identified problems are fixed and not just simply tolerated.

By taking these initial steps to increase our awareness and commit as an organization to having each other’s backs on safety, we will continue to make progress toward an injury-free workplace.

In 2020 across EB, we had our best year ever with regard to safety.  Because of your efforts, 427 fewer people were injured and got to go home to their family and friends in the same condition they came to work.

I hope that in the not-too-distant future, I will be able to end a message on safety, like this one, with no mention of COVID.  And, I think we’re getting closer, with the Moderna vaccine now being deployed in the U.S. in addition to the Pfizer vaccine. Our Medical Team is working to expand our access to rapid testing technologies for all employees, so that we can run tests ourselves with faster results. Over the break, we received three rapid-test machines that we are working to get set up and operational. I will keep you posted on progress.

In the meantime, we have winter to get through and, if you’re keeping an eye on COVID positivity rates like I am, you recognize COVID is at record high levels across the country. According to the TSA, Saturday set a record for the highest number of Americans traveling through our airports since the start of the pandemic. People moving around will most certainly add to the positivity rate. Over the break, we also learned about a new strain of COVID that is as much as 70% more contagious than the previous strain.

So now, more than any time during this pandemic, please protect yourself, your loved ones and your co-workers. Continue to practice the 3 W’s: Wear a mask, Wash your hands, and Watch your distance. Those of you who can work from home should do so, and if you feel sick, please don’t come to work.

Thank you for all the great work you do for our company and our nation. Let’s all commit to a safe and successful 2021, and look forward to our lives feeling more like they did pre-COVID by the end of 2021.

Thanks for listening; we’ll talk again soon.

Kevin

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