Competition Can Create a Safer Workplace

An industrial kitchen can be a dangerous place, with its sharp knives, wet floors, plentiful grease and hot temperatures.

Vanessa Bethea, a lead hospitality associate and member of SEIU UHW, still remembers when she witnessed a colleague being injured by a huge meat slicer.

The kitchen at the Panorama City Medical Center, where Bethea works, is a 54-member department, covering two shifts with staggered start times. It was also among the most injury-prone groups at the medical center, so hospital leadership asked the department to come up with a plan to improve its safety record.

The nine-member representative group for the UBT came up with the idea of dividing the department into two teams (simply named Team A and Team B) and sponsoring a friendly competition between them for a pair of movie tickets.

This motivated—and liberated—the staff to approach their colleagues who might be performing a task unsafely and suggest an alternative approach.

“We were ‘big brothering’ each other, which helped us catch things that could have led to an accident,” Bethea says. “It kept a friendly flow throughout the day and created more awareness of safety hazards.”

The team went nearly a year without any accepted claims for workplace injuries, down from about one injury a month.

Bethea says naysayers wanted to infect others in the department with negative attitudes, but the team overcame the hurdle by emphasizing how improving safety will help the whole department.

They also encouraged those naysayers to join the UBT’s representative group.

For more about this team's work to share with your team and spark performance improvement ideas, download a powerpoint.