"No job or task is that important that we cannot take the time to do it safely."
Gogo has a strong focus on health and safety best practice. Our health and safety culture are led internally by employees and proactive reporting is encouraged to ensure accidents are prevented if at all possible.
Establishing a culture of safety starts at the top. At Gogo Logistics, safety is, if anything, over-communicated. Literally every time our Founder, Silas Okitte, speaks, safety is the first thing he mentions. It’s absolutely crucial that C-level executives make it clear that safety is a top priority. Otherwise, all the posters, training and speeches will come across as so much service. The commitment must be real and go from the top down.
It helps, too, that the number one item in our 5-point GOGO Code the foundation of our corporate culture, is “No job or task is that important that we cannot take the time to do it safely.”
As part of establishing a positive safety culture, we look for opportunities to celebrate accomplishments. For instance, we get workers excited about hitting records for incident-free days which we see as an opportunity to build positive energy. As we set targets, the safety group make a clear communication on the expected reward when the targets are achieved and announce each benchmark passed. We celebrate successes as they happen, but we also keep the big picture in mind and share those results as well.
In order to reassure our colleagues that we’re not here to throw them under the bus, we spend time building personal relationships. We make sure that employees don’t see managers and auditors ONLY during audit time doing audit-type work, but we talk and listen to their concerns. Everyone attend safety meetings and celebrations and we invest time to show how personally invested everyone is in the company’s success.
At GOGO, it typically take us a full hour to do a walk-through for any new client, depending on the size of the facility. We regard this as an active period of discovery that’s just the beginning of a safety assessment. It’s a collaborative and interactive process.
There’s a whole universe of accident causes, but the major root causes are attributed to human factors. We therefore train our personnel rigorously to be more conscious of predictable hazards.
To drive down our RIR, we make safety a highly visible element of everyday operations. At GOGO, we clearly display our current days without incident metric, as well as other safety and compliance measures. Supervisors take pride in having good performance and take ownership of these numbers.
This transparency and accountability creates healthy competition between facilities/sites. Our Supervisors want the full team to succeed but, like most of us, they want to win. So we encourage friendly competition among GOGO facilities/sites. We’re also careful to make distinctions between facilities for the sake of fairness. We believe that Competition is healthy; it just needs to be fair.
We acknowledge that a good logistics safety program goes way beyond a set of policies, procedures and a training schedule. Our secret sauce is to develop a pervasive, operations-wide culture that understands that safety is simply smart business, and that it applies to absolutely everyone.
That kind of safety culture doesn’t get established in a couple of months, but it takes years to get a mature culture of safety in place. We boast of a strong, proactive and safety-minded Leader who is helping us shorten this timeline by constantly reinforcing the importance of safety and the role of each individual employee.
Our ultimate belief is that safe logistics operations don’t happen because of a few hard-working safety managers but meaningful progress happens only when associates, across the organization, embrace safety as a personal responsibility.