Building a Safety-First Culture
A safety-first culture is one in which we consistently demonstrate that there is nothing more important than the safety of the public, our workforce and our contractors. We are committed to creating an environment in which safety is embraced as an unwavering value reflected in all aspects of our culture and our operations. Our work in recent years has led to real, measurable progress and we continue to pursue further opportunities to build on our results, recognizing that on safety our journey must always be one of continuous improvement.
Safety Culture Roadmap
We continue to take concrete steps to create a culture where every employee is empowered to speak up about safety and approaches each task with a safety-first mindset.
We have used the results of a comprehensive assessment of PG&E’s safety culture to create a multi-year roadmap to guide our efforts. Key elements of the roadmap include emphasizing and supporting safety leadership development at every level, focusing on reducing exposure to potential serious incidents before they occur, and training employees to observe and provide feedback to one another on safety.
Safety Governance
We enhanced our governance structure in 2014 to create greater alignment in the way we develop and implement safety strategies—from our Chairman’s Safety Council to our grassroots teams. With this new structure in place, we are focused on setting clear direction, ensuring leaders are observing field work firsthand and hearing from employees, and improving our ability to quickly remove barriers to progress.
- Chairman’s Safety Council: guides our safety strategy and assures continuous improvement in safety performance. The Council meets regularly to review performance and address gaps and barriers. In addition to the PG&E Corporation Chairman and CEO, members include PG&E’s presidents, senior PG&E officers and leaders from the IBEW and ESC labor unions.
- Line of Business Safety Councils: responsible for executing plans to reduce and eliminate exposure to possible safety incidents. The Councils are comprised of management, union and grassroots team members. These efforts are supported by grassroots safety teams comprised of frontline employees who share ideas, partner to come up with effective solutions and drive PG&E closer to our goal of zero injuries.
- Enterprise Safety Working Team: responsible for reviewing enterprise-wide plans to reduce and eliminate exposure to incidents and improve our culture. Comprised of representatives from the lines of business and safety organization, this team reviews and provides recommendations for initiatives to ensure that we are providing proactive and consistent enterprise solutions to safety challenges.
Together with our continued benchmarking to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of our safety programs, all of these steps are helping to improve our safety culture and reduce serious employee and public safety incidents.