HEALTH & SAFETY

Investor Relations

Our Focus on Employee Health and Safety

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT – A KEY COMPONENT

Our Safety Efforts

KEEPING SAFETY TOP OF MIND

Safety first. Always. And, it starts with me.

Our safety motto says it all. We are relentlessly focused on safety. Through best practice sharing and an emphasis on leading indicators, we are strengthening our safety culture of learning and building a safer work environment. By putting our efforts into behaviors like safety training, safety walks, safety committee engagement, risk recognition and mitigation, and mistake and error proofing through poka yokes and near miss reporting, we’re moving the needle on our lagging indicators – that rear view look at what happened, like recordables and incident rates.

When it comes to safety, active involvement and a sense of responsibility from employees are critical. Our Safety Committees at each division help us increase engagement, while emphasizing our proactive commitment to working safely.

To drive engagement, we make our safety programs, information and messaging easily accessible and interactive. We also provide regular opportunities for employees to directly contribute to a safer work environment by encouraging employees to “GO GEMBA” - or go see, taking a closer look at everyday processes to find ways to make them safer. Employees are encouraged to and rewarded for reporting near misses by identifying opportunities to make safety improvements and completing related “poka yoke” projects. In fact, each year, we award thousands of dollars through the Fe (Flawless execution) Award and Poka Yoke contests that drive safety improvement and innovation.

Our safety journey is one of continuous learning and improvement, centered around engagement from every employee. To support these efforts, we launched a Safety Benchmarking initiative in 2023. In partnership with a third-party consultant, we completed an enterprise-wide employee survey, division employee focus groups and industry analysis that will inform our ongoing Safety Strategy and programs.

BUILDING FROM OUR BASELINE - SAFETY ACTION PLANS

FOCUS ON FUNDAMENTALS - ONGOING SAFETY TRAINING 

We continue to focus on fundamentals through our annual baseline Safety Actions Plans – executed at each of our processing facilities: 

• Safety Committees or Safety Teams to meet monthly 
• Review and update all Job Safety Analyses (JSAs) 
• Review and update all Lock-Out, Tag-Out (LOTO) policies and machine-specific procedures 
• Complete all required Safety Training 
• Conduct weekly (at a minimum) Safety / 5S / Housekeeping Walks 
• Complete a Dock Safety or Traffic Safety Improvement Project 
• Complete Poka Yoke Safety Improvement Activities 
• Document Near Miss Events 
  

In addition, our employees attend safety training monthly. Our recurring annual training calendar includes: 

• Electrical Safety 
• Lock Out Tag Out 
• Crane Safety 
• Lifting and Rigging Equipment 
• Confined Spaces 
• First Aid and Bloodborne Pathogens 
• Fire Prevention and Emergency Action Planning 
• Hearing Conservation 
• Hand Safety 
• Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) 
• Working Around Mobile Equipment 
• Walking and Working Surfaces 
• Workplace Violence 
  

We keep safety at the forefront of all we do through the leadership of our management teams and safety professionals; extensive training, safety protocols, engineering controls; and the focus we put on safety in our company communications and information. Not only is safety a top priority for employees, but we also extend our health and safety policies to suppliers, visitors and contractors.



Our Occupational Health and Safety performance includes:

• tracking occupational injuries/illnesses and work-related fatalities;
•  maintaining multiple policies designed to comply with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards;
•  establishing and training volunteer First Responders at all locations; and
• conducting routine departmental safety audits and inspections
  

And, our relentless focus on safety is getting recognized! Click here

for a list of Safety recognition Olympic Steel has earned. See the talented team of Safety Professionals leading our efforts and their extensive list of credentials. Click here

Olympic Steel, Inc. is a proud member of the National Safety Council

LEARN MORE

Find additional information in our most recent Corporate Responsibility Report available here