At Wallis Cos., our focus is vast: EBITDA, operational efficiency, gross profit, food sales, ROI, opening new stores, remodeling tired ones, car-wash sales, winning new customers, retention, customer satisfaction and making our company a great place to work.
But our No. 1 focus this year is safety. Safety is one of the nine core values at Wallis, so it is never off our radar screen. But with a renewed effort this year, our goal is to be accident-free.
Sounds lofty? We know it won’t be easy. Safety will be core to our culture. We can speak about it at every company event, and we can write about it in all of our company newsletters and in the many communication opportunities that happen almost every day.
But until we act safely every minute of every day and in every thought we have, we are like a hockey player who has to think about skating instead of just slapping the puck into the net.
Financial Ramifications
One part of our strategy is to share more information demonstrating the benefits of how important safety is to each person and their families, and then for each of us to understand how important being safe is to the company.
Wellness and well-being are critical for productive and sharp personnel. People who are healthy and who have a healthy work-life balance tend to be excited to come to work and generate energy in their ideas and their job responsibilities.
Every person at Wallis seriously discusses safety at least once a month.
The National Safety Council’s website shows nearly 11 American workers die on the job each day, or 4,000 a year, while close to 12,900 U.S. workers are injured on the job each day, or about 4.7 million each year. That’s staggering!
The financial implications of worker injury and death are overwhelming, to the tune
of $140 billion annually. The point of this information is not to make each of us afraid to
clock into work each morning, but to help us understand the importance of safety and to highlight what the savings can mean to our businesses.
Again citing the National Safety Council, there is a possible savings of $39,000 for each avoided medically consulted injury, $1.42 million for each avoided occupational fatality, and a possible savings of $4 of indirect incident cost for every $1 of direct costs.
Talk About It
At the recently held NACS State of the Industry Summit, we talked about better controlling our direct-store operating costs (DSOE). Making safety first, we believe, is a big one.
When we at Wallis are safe, we obviously have more dollars to spend on the finer things in life, such as wages, benefits, company events, facilities, equipment, marketing and, most important, taking care of our customers. While these benefits are important, even more important is the safety and well-being of each individual so that we can all go home to our family and friends every day.
The importance of safety is clear, but how we keep moving forward and how we make it part of our culture and something that is always top of mind is more challenging. First and foremost is how we communicate this to our company’s leadership, and how these individuals engage the rest of the organization.
At Wallis, we measure safety on each of our divisions’ balanced score card. The score card is used to document our strategy and articulate and measure the ways that we achieve the strategy. So at a minimum, every person at Wallis seriously discusses safety at least once a month during the divisions’ balanced-score-card meetings.
We also have a safety committee that oversees all incidents. The committee puts into practice initiatives and processes to support safety. Meeting with our insurance provider is critical, and we learn from them on best practices and benchmarks for risk management and creating the safety culture that we strive for each day.
And finally, we just know that we will feel better, no pun intended, when we can say that we are accident-free. There are many ways and ideas to keep us safe. And I love this quote from John Wooden: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
Lynn Wallis is president and CEO of Wallis Cos. Reach her at lwallis@mail.wallisco.com.
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