Employee Mentoring Elevates Jobsite Safety

A major concern with rapidly growing companies is the ability to safely and productively integrate new employees at all levels of experience. At Faith Technologies, we recognized that a large percentage of our recordable injuries were occurring with fairly new hires in 2014, when 64% of incidents involved employees with less than six-month’s tenure.

These injuries were occurring with new employees at all levels of experience, so the next year we created and rolled out our Short Service Employee (SSE) program. Through this, we decided to utilize blue hard hats to identify new Faith employees on jobsites, so that more tenured employees would be aware of who they are, as well as be reminded to assist and monitor them more closely.

Today when our SSE employees arrive on the jobsite, they attend site-specific safety orientations and are assigned on-site mentors. The mentors are their go-to people to answer routine questions regarding not only safety issues, but also productivity and any other questions they might have.

The SSE program includes all new field employees, from inexperienced helpers through executive level employees with years of experience – no one is exempt. These employees are monitored for the first six months of their employment and then are evaluated by their mentors, and must also complete an evaluation of their own progress as well as of the overall program. Upon successful completion, the employee graduates and is presented with a white hard hat to end the SSE period. If there are still questions regarding the safety performance or focus of the SSE, the mentorship program can be extended or reinstated, as necessary.

Since the implementation of the program, we have observed a steady reduction in the percentage of injuries involving our SSE employees, to 58% in 2015, 25% in 2016, and through the first half of 2017 it is tracking at 17%. Feedback from both the mentors and mentees has been very positive. The mentorship program gives SSE employees the freedom and confidence to ask questions regarding all aspects of their duties, and safety is always at the forefront of these discussions.

While the statistical improvement is a very positive sign, there have been other program benefits that we didn’t predict when implementing this process. Our mentors take a lot of pride in the progress of their mentees, and our mentees take pride in doing things the Faith way. Feedback indicates our new employees are feeling much more connected with our company as a whole in the short timeframe, and the SSE program overall has been another way we are demonstrating our Uncompromised Focus on Keeping People Safe.

We celebrate the presentation of white hard hats with graduation pictures published in our daily safety bulletin and on Faith’s social media channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter. Next time you see these employees recognized, please help us congratulate them!