HEALTH AND SAFETY
We believe that a strong safety culture is central to our business success and 2022 represents the 21st year applying a systematic approach to occupational safety and health improvement. The health, safety and well-being of employees is our highest priority and a Materion core value. To ensure our colleagues leave their workplace safely every day we maintain a comprehensive, systems based approach to continually improving Environmental, Health & Safety (EH&S) performance.
We review and update our long-range strategies on an annual basis. Each global location develops and implements site specific improvement plans based on prior injuries, observations, audit results and near misses. Locations track completion progress, execution is supported by the corporate EHS function and execution is tied to leadership incentive compensation. The predominate themes in 2022 centered around increasing employee engagement in the EHS improvement process, improving hazard awareness, decreasing the risk of ergonomic injuries and reducing the risk of hand injuries. Critical safety statistics, metrics and trends are published daily on our corporate intranet site. The near miss frequency rate, OSHA recordable injury rate and the severity rate for full-time employees are checked on a daily basis and receive executive review on a monthly basis. Contracted employees’ injury and near miss experience is also tracked in a similar fashion. Lessons learned from serious incidents and near misses are shared across the organization along with other proactive measures to promote transparency, and increase visibility which all serve to improve employee hazard awareness and lower risk tolerance. Safety procedures, observations, compliance audits, and awareness training are implemented at all global facilities.
PROTECTING PEOPLE
Materion works very hard every day to continuously reduce the risk of injury to its people and contractors. Materion is committed to fully comply with all applicable product safety, occupational safety and health, and environmental laws and regulations. Key safety metrics, as seen below, are trending down and we are thankful to each employee for their continued vigilance, contributions and engagement. Materion did not experience a workplace fatality during the timeframe covered in the bar chart below. Injury frequency performance for 2022 improved slightly from the prior year while severity performance achieved the second lowest rate in the last 5 years. Reductions in ergonomic and laceration injuries account for the difference, as both were improvement focus areas for most sites. Product stewardship also plays an important role at Materion. The safe use and handling of our products is a vital aspect of our responsibility as a good corporate citizen and we have had an award-winning product stewardship program for over 50 years. In addition to our EH&S program, Materion has a robust approach to Security at all sites which includes ALICE emergency preparedness training in the event of an active shooter.
