COS: Many of the mills your company operates in Europe and North America have had impressive statistics with regards to employee safety performance. Tell us more.

Scott Gaddis: Kimberly Clark has been a very conservative company. We track all of our illnesses and injuries together. We’ve come down from a 4.5 TIR (total incident rate) and we’ve had five mills that didn’t have a single injury last year (2007). Out of the 13 mills in this particular business sector, we’ve actually had 11 of those 13 that have been below one in total incident rate, which we consider still at world-class. The severity rate has fallen 352 per cent in that same ten-year period. So that certainly dictates to us that we’re saving workers’ compensation dollar.

A couple of reasons, I think, for that is actual commitment from our senior leaders to value the very values that are our workers –care about the physical protection of themselves, better capability, and driving expectation with the workforce. So those are really three things that we continue to really engage our employees on, and actually having them be a part of the solution. We know when we empower teams of people, our product is better, regardless if that’s policy or standard or procedures.

COS: Was there a catalyst that formed this safety principle and the resulting improvements in safety performance?

SG: I think when people talk about “catalyst,” it’s usually following some type of severe catastrophic event. At Kimberly Clark we have a tremendous heritage in occupational safety. We’re one of the very charter members of the National Safety Council. So we go back a long, long way in protecting workers.

What was starting to happen, though, is we started thinking differently about safety. And back in the very early 90s, we were going to build a tissue mill in Owensboro, Kentucky, and at that time paper mills had an incident rate from about five up to 13-14. So we had a couple of folks in senior leadership who said, “I wonder if we could build a paper mill that could literally be safe.” And we presented that out to the market and they laughed at us. We wanted to build a high-performance work space, we wanted to build a workplace where we had few resources – people like me – and more people that were actually dedicated to making products for us. And it worked. I can tell you that I left GE with a staff of about 11 people. I came in to Kimberly Clark with absolutely no one. And a lot of us did. And what happens when you do that and you still have to get the work done, so you push it out to the very people who make product for us and allow them to become risk managers. That changed my role from the guy who was making decisions to building capability in the workforce.

And that is really the success template. If I spend my day coaching and mentoring for the results that I want to see, the employees are more prone to give it to me because they own the process. And we really do talk about it that way – it’s not a program-to-process at Kimberly Clark, it’s continually improving, it doesn’t mean we always make better rates than we did last year, but we know where we are. We know why we could not and then we could push forward from there.

So the catalyst is that when we empower people, our employees give us what we desire and everybody wins.

COS: As a safety professional with such an extensive experience, what best practice approaches can you share with other safety leaders out there?

SG: I certainly can reflect fairly quickly because I was one of these guys. I came away from General Electric in a corporate role back to a facility because that’s where my roots are – a place where we make stuff. And then what happens is you have success so you’re crawling back out of there. And I know exactly what a safety manager is going through. I think if you were to ask any safety manager today, (the challenge) is continuing to see a struggle of senior leaders valuing safety to the level that they do.

I sometimes do this. I travel around a lot and I talk a lot about safety. I always kind of caption a safety leader in any facility almost as a volunteer fireman that’s very technical, very passionate about what he does and he knows what he or she is supposed to do. So how do we elevate that passion, that thinking up to the senior level? One of the things I have learned is you can’t do it, it’s not a grassroots kind of thing. It can come up from the safety manager. But it really does have to be delivered from high and then driven down and out through the organization.

One of the things I spend a lot of time on as safety leader is actually learning how to talk business-speak with your senior leaders. And it is different. It’s very technical at times, driven by a lot of numbers – some of the things that we don’t like to talk about because we like to humanize the approach.

Then the next thing is purely process. We get a lot of stuff in and around the show that we can pick from and put in and install in facilities that would “make us safer,” but it’s the process of how we do that. It’s actually realizing the vision we have for the facilities, for the corporations that we work with, and it’s very basic fundamental management process of actually coming up with tangible objectives that we can deliver through very basic fundamental strategy. And it’s all there in our grasp we just really have to align it and put it in place and then make sure that the obstacles and the barriers are controlled so you can realize it.

So when I look at safety managers, there’s a tremendous amount of capability that that person has to have to be successful and quite honestly, I’ve terminated a lot of safety professionals that can’t get past the office, they can’t get past the rule book. And I can take somebody very passionate and build capability. I rarely can do it the other way around.