“Making our performance on Health and Safety more visible has created a great sense of energy around our goals”
Brian O’Shea joined Glanbia Nutritionals (GN) as a graduate 10 years ago and is VP Engineering, Environment, Health and Safety. He talks about his part in a powerful cultural shift that has helped achieve the best safety results ever.
I head up the engineering and environmental Health and Safety (H&S) teams and my base is in Twin Falls, Idaho, but I travel quite a bit. For nearly two weeks each month I’m at a different site or location, so I’m always on the move.
We manufacture in the US as well as Montreal, Germany and China and our central services are in Ireland, so there’s always something going on. And with the nature of manufacturing being 24/7, the business never stops. It’s busy, but I enjoy it.
There’s a lot of overlap between the engineering, the H&S and the environmental, regulatory and compliance sides of my role, which can entail anything from scaling up a new product from pilot to full production, investing in improved technology or even building a new facility.
As one team, we have people with great strengths from many disciplines and it’s up to me to deploy them where they can have the most impact.
That’s my role – making sure that we’re allocating people and resources to the key areas and that we’re focusing on the right things to help grow the business.
Seeing Glanbia’s Health and Safety vision come to life
I feel like H&S was embedded in me from growing up on a farm, surrounded by machinery and equipment. As an engineer, you have responsibility for peoples’ safety with everything you do, build or create. I’ve always felt that H&S is a critical part of the engineering function.
I assumed central responsibility for the environmental H&S team about two years ago, to support our Chief Operating Officer Tom Tench. His vision is to build a zero-harm culture and to safely deliver quality products, on time and in full, as efficiently as possible.
Supply chain leadership and plant personnel across the Glanbia network have driven that emphasis on safety and this has brought about a cultural shift.
Focused and intentional about H&S
There was a lot of great H&S work going on previously and our aim was to bring more focus to what needs to be done. The biggest challenge was to keep the vision simple.
We can log and track an enormous amount of our H&S data on a central management system, from near miss reports to injury categories and much more. So the first step was to put visibility on what the data was telling us and make this available throughout the organisation. We created a live dashboard so people can see common trends and themes, whether that’s type of injury, the root cause of an incident, or the way it’s managed. We can then set up folks to target specific areas to minimise repeat events. It allows us to be more intentional about what we do, and assign resource or capital effectively, which in turn means we have more impact.
In addition, one of the sites took on a new programme called SafeStart. SafeStart focuses on practical training to help workers avoid injuries caused by human factors that are involved in the majority of incidents. It triggered wider awareness and that reduced the number of injuries on-site by 50 percent.
Lowest incident rates, least time lost
The dashboard has generated a great sense of energy. Sites have always performed very well against industry benchmarks, but plants can now see how well they compare with others in the network. We wanted to create that little bit of healthy competition; everyone is enjoying it and buying into it. It’s extremely powerful.
From that has come better performance. We’re very proud that last year, GN achieved its best ever health and safety performance over a 12-month period. We had our lowest incident rates in terms of frequency and severity and the least time lost. It’s a milestone achievement and I’m pleased to confirm this performance has continued through 2023.
Delivering better nutrition while keeping people safe
In Glanbia Nutritionals we have 2,500 people working in our manufacturing sites. I want us to create a workplace where they feel safe and they’re returning to their families every day – it’s a big responsibility.
That’s the one thing that could keep me up at night, but being active outdoors helps me deal with the pressure. I enjoy trail running so at weekends you’ll find me in the mountains. I play sports, including golf, which is good for teaching patience and a great way to clear your head.
I enjoy the fast-paced environment and feel lucky to be part of a great team and to work with some wonderful people.
It’s not necessarily what I do that gives me the most satisfaction, it’s seeing the results of what others can do once you set up an environment in which they can excel. Delivering better nutrition while keeping our employees safe.
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