My names David Foote I’m the CEO of a family owned company, Australian Country Choice,
based in Brisbane but operating across most of South Western Queensland and here in Brisbane
we have meat processing facility that does primary processing, value adding, retail packing,
and we employee 1220 Queenslanders.
I come to this industry after a lifetime in agricultural, been a farmer but haven’t
had a short break in as an underground miner in the nickel operations in the desert Western
Australia which is both life changing and both monetary rewards and life changing in
my attitude toward two important parts of life now, safety and work practices.
Whilst I only spent eleven and a half months as an underground miner I actually lost five
co-workers.
We were actually attending a funeral therefore every two months and chipping in out of our
weekly wage to widows who were probably my age as well, 23 or 24 and probably a kid in
a pram or a kid on the way, So it’s taken probably 30 years for that to sink in and
work out that doesn’t have to be the norm.
ACC took over the Cannon Hill site back in 2000 and it would be fair to say that probably
the safety culture in the site ant the workforce at that time may have been at a near all-time
low.
We entered here with one of the worst insurance premium rates for work cover and over the
time we worked out that ever impact that we could have on reducing that actually was a
financial benefit.
So within three years of taking over the site we actually managed to reduce our initial
premium by 50%.
That financial benefit not only gave us more productivity and less lost time but it also
created some dollars to start to development some safety processes and importantly install
some safety equipment across the site and maybe bring the site up, which has been here
in existence for 90 years to a more modern level of a work place.
Whilst ACC strives and we talk about best practice, we talk about leadership we want
to be at the front, we want to be a good role model, were not perfect we are not incident
free, We’ve had two major incidences in the last ten years that involved either a
forklift incident here at the factory and a serious injury to a young lady and we have
had a more recent amputation at one of our feed mill operations out in rural.
The amputation incident out at the feed lot which is quite a small workforce community
where they all live together, work together was dramatic the district was flooded, we
could not get any ambulance in or out, we couldn’t get traffic in or out, the only
helicopter in the district was 6 hours away so we actually had to provide medical assistance
on site to a major amputation and the emotional impact that had on staff is still telling
today in fact some of our staff are still been receiving counselling over that incident
more than a year later.
The incidence give you a consistent reminder are you doing everything that you can, have
you got every yellow line painted on the ground?
Have you got every sign up that you can?
Is your production management team really responding to your safety management team?
Or are your safety people, are they just going around doing the tick and flick with actually
been able to drive change cultures, what you got to do, you actually got to give your safety
team the confidence that they are of as equal importance and standing in your work structure
as the production people.
Taking workers for the journey and making it front of their mind is actually one of
the greater challenges in business.
We actually have a stop for safety work day now as part of our practice, so for the last
5 years we shut the factory down for two periods a day because we are on two shifts and we
actually try instead of the boss bashing them, cause that’s what bosses do, we actually
bring in outsiders to try and deliver a message and a different message each year.
So we stop the factory, get lunch, its 500 people, it’s not an easy process feeding
500 people and we bring on a speaker, we have had Mal Meninga when he was safety ambassador,
we are trying to use other people other than the boss banging the table to get our message
across that we actually care about you and if we care about you maybe you would like
to care about you a little more as well.
The CEO in any organisation has to lead the safety challenge in their business, otherwise
it’s just lip service or people doing what they feel they have to do.
If it doesn’t come from the top it will take twice as long to get to the bottom.
First thing is, don’t give up.
It’s not easy, don’t do it cause you have to, do it because you want to but you aren’t
on your own.
so there is a whole group of business out there that are prepared to help and pitch
in so you are not on your own and its worth doing.