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Gwen Walter is the Houston Public Library safety officer. She has been involved in HPL’s safety efforts for years. Safety has been a point of emphasis for the department, but the ZIP program has given new focus to HPL’s safety program, which includes not only an active safety committee but involvement of HPL staff across the city. Walter recently discussed HPL safety and how ZIP is helping.
COH Safety News: When your department’s safety committee team was developed, how did you choose its members?
Gwen Walter: The Houston Public Library Safety Committee was established 12 years ago. HPL has 40 neighborhood library locations throughout the city. As part of the system, we have several support departments that I like to call “behind the wall” departments. The staff members in these departments are not front-facing employees that meet the public, issue books, or do what our trained librarians do. But these teams strongly support our organization behind the scenes. These teams are our Executive Leadership, Community Outreach, Communications, Digital Strategies, Financial Services, Customer Experience, Organizational Development and Spaces. In developing HPL’s Safety Committee, we wanted to make sure we had a good cross section of representation from all internal departmental groups. We expressed our goals and mission and asked the managers of each of our internal departments to select an individual from their team to join the department’s safety committee and they did. That’s how our members were selected.
COH Safety News: You mention HPL’s goals and missions. Can you elaborate?
Gwen Walter: Our main mission is to make sure the Houston Public Library is a safe place to work for our staff and also a safe place for our visitors. We believe that our responsibility of safe environments extends beyond our staff, so we want to make sure everyone remains safe.
Our goal is to reduce injuries every year. Before the Zero is Possible safety program, our goal was to reduce injuries by 10% every year. All strides towards a reduction in injuries were a win for us. The ZIP goal is now for us to work towards obtaining zero injuries. Now that ZIP has rolled out to our department, our goal has changed to attempt to reach zero accidents, zero injuries, and zero compromises, as outlined in the ZIP safety program.
COH Safety News: Was it difficult to adjust your department safety committee meetings to the new ZIP format?
Gwen Walter: When ZIP was rolled out to our department, we did not have to adjust very much. Our department safety committee has been working together for the past 12 years, so we have been able to meet consistently bimonthly throughout the years. We had an accident prevention plan already in place. Therefore, we were already acclimated to working safely and having safety goals to reduce injuries. We are already doing much of the ZIP plan that has now been introduced to our employees. The ZIP safety program did introduce a new incident investigation form that we will now use instead of the former form we had. Also, we will need to implement a new ZIP program element — “near miss” reporting. We are gearing up to implement this. With these two updates, we will support the compliance goals of the ZIP safety program.
COH Safety News: What is the main focus for Houston Library’s Safety Committee meetings?
Gwen Walter: Of course, we always embrace our mission and our goal. Periodically, various safety issues arise in our organization that we need to investigate and address. However, our main focus is once again to make sure we have done all we can do to ensure that all of our library locations remain safe places. We also go to great efforts to maintain our annual awards program to recognize and thank team members who have contributed to HPL’s safety goals. We talk about that quite a bit. At least six months out of the year, we try to see who is going to win and what we can do to celebrate them. We do an analysis of accidents across the board from all our divisions and units to award each group on individual safety accomplishments. This safety conversation is mainly about how we can celebrate them for doing good safety things.
If there is a safety issue, we discuss those issues, especially if we see there is a trend that is rising. Then the committee discusses what we can do to mitigate those problems. Sometimes, we have to really dig deep and see why we are having a higher trend in things — for example, trips and falls, our highest indicator.
COH Safety News: So it sounds like you are really utilizing ZIP’s “Plan, Do, Check, Act” sequence as part of the program.
Gwen Walter: Yes, we are.
COH Safety News: Can you discuss your competitive teams and who are they competing with?
Gwen Walker: We are competing with each other, and we have been doing this for quite some time. We have divided our entire staff into competitive teams, based on where they are located across Houston. The members of these teams have changed over the years with attrition and people changing job locations within our organization. This competitive team strategy really motivated our staff to be safety conscious. These safety competitions were very successful when they were introduced seven years ago, to our amazing surprise. We were all saying, “Wow, it is really working.” So, we decided to continue. The most important outcome was that, as the competitions continued, our incident rates decreased.
COH Safety News: So, it sounds like you have a competitive group. What did they get if they won?
Gwen Walker: We have an internal website that we use for employee resources. All winners are spotlighted on this popular communication tool for about a week. They also receive a nice certificate that they could be proud of, as we fashion it around a theme or what we did that year. And it has the important signatures of our director and executive leader team. The employees know that they will be receiving this beautiful certificate, and that is bragging rights in itself. They get the certificate, recognition on the intranet, and everyone knows that they support safety and are safety conscious. If funding is available, we also provide a plaque award for winners.
COH Safety News: How have you shared with others how your department engages employees to work toward ZIP’s goals of Zero Accidents, Zero injuries, and Zero Compromises?
Gwen Walker: On several occasions I have had the opportunity to present our safety activities and accomplishments at the Citywide Safety Committee meeting. Therefore, other City of Houston departments have been able to see our successes. Some of the other city departments have adopted some of HPL’s safety strategies as well. I really like the Citywide Safety Committee because it gives us these types of opportunities. We have shared our successes and our losses. I have even reached out for help from this group as well, so we are able to learn from each other. The Citywide Safety Committee is wonderful and I’m proud to be a part of it.
COH Safety News: Great! Sounds like you use the Citywide Safety Committee as a tool to help motivate others with your success stories and to reach out for help when there is a safety hurtle in the way.
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