HEALTH AND SAFETY
We believe that a strong safety culture is central to our business success. The health, safety and well-being of employees is our highest priority and a Materion core value, and to ensure our colleagues leave their workplace safely every day, we maintain a comprehensive approach to Environmental, Health & Safety (EH&S).
On an annual basis, we review and update our strategic long-range strategies. For each global location, we develop improvement plans to track progress, and publish daily critical safety statistics and metrics on our corporate intranet site, with detailed descriptions of serious injuries, near misses, corrective actions and other proactive measures to promote transparency, make lessons learned visible and ensure worker safety.
Safety procedures, audits, and awareness training are implemented at all global facilities. For example, Materion has implemented an EH&S safety scorecard at this production facilities focused on ensuring safe work practices and recognition of employees who adhere to safety protocols. We also have onsite medical teams at two key manufacturing sites to provide medical testing for employees to determine any potential exposure to Beryllium, of which Materion is a leading global supplier.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of keeping our employees safe and healthy. Our Company manufactures products which are deemed essential to critical infrastructure and therefore, all production sites continued to operate during the pandemic. To ensure employee safety, we have made global investments and taken actions that reflect recommendations by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Workplace Adaptations:
- Work from home flexibility
- Adjusting attendance policies to encourage those who are sick to stay home
- Modifying workspaces with plexiglass dividers and adding touchless faucets
Health & Safety Protocols:
- Increasing cleaning protocols across all locations
- Establishing temperature screening at all manufacturing facilities
- Creating physical distancing procedures for onsite employees
- Providing additional personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies
- Implementing protocols to address COVID-19 cases and potential exposure
- Establishing regular communications regarding COVID-19 impacts, including health and safety protocols and procedures
- Requiring masks at all locations where permitted by local law
- Prohibiting non-essential domestic and international travel
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.
PROTECTING PEOPLE
Materion strives every day to protect people. Product stewardship 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. 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 and safety mindset; and as a result Materion did not experience a workplace fatality during the timeframe covered in the bar chart below. This focus on our employees enables us to set a good example to the rest of our industry by ensuring that we always meet—or exceed—all applicable laws and regulations. While injury frequency performance for 2021 did not improve from the prior year for the first time since 2016, we did achieve the second lowest injury severity rate in the company’s history. The increase in injury frequency was primarily driven by the challenges associated with new employee training resulting from record demand. A number of mitigations have been implemented to the new employee training process such as improved job specific hazard awareness, job observations and auditing. We are confident these improvements have mitigated this issue.
