New TIP Touts a Hands-on Approach to Safety

Safety is not just a buzzword for the pulp, paper, tissue, and packaging industries—it’s critical to our operations and to our collective future. For an inspired group of TAPPI members and safety professionals, that was the motivation behind a new TAPPI Technical Information Paper (TIP) that outlines a proven approach to safety training that any mill can use. PIMA TIP 1502-01: Improving Safety Training—A Hands-on Approach represents a new category for TIPs and the first from the PIMA Division.

Kurt Mehlberg is quality solutions manager for Domtar. He also had a big hand in developing this new TIP with other members of PIMA’s Safety Committee. As Mehlberg says, “We’re all on that safety journey to the elimination of life-altering injuries in our industry”—there is no other acceptable goal for any mill or plant.

Paper360°’s monthly podcast, Better Together: Conversations with Innovative Leaders, recently invited Mehlberg to share more about this TIP’s development process and why the effort has been so beneficial.

SPOTTING THE NEED

As the industry has transitioned toward virtual classroom or online training methods, there are many aspects of operations that require hands-on safety training to be truly effective, including Serious Incident and Fatality (SIF) occurrences. Some companies have determined that certain SIF activities must be trained using a hands-on approach.

Mehlberg had previously served as executive director of PIMA (the TAPPI Division devoted to industry-specific leadership issues) and later formed the PIMA Safety Committee. A committee meeting at TAPPICon 2021 turned into an idea-generating dynamo. “We had more than 50 ideas generated,” says Mehlberg. “We actually did it with sticky notes right on the wall. Folks wrote down their ideas, put them on the wall, and we organized them with a benefit/effort chart. Then everybody had the opportunity to vote for their top three. One of the top three turned into this TIP.”

PIMA TIP 1502-01 illustrates the impact and value of hands-on safety training with actual industry safety results and provides best practice examples. As the committee worked to compile and refine this content, there was deep discussion about the best way to share it. “At the end of the day, we’re doing this to get it out to as many people as possible in the spirit of reducing risk across the industry, so people can go home the way they came to work. There is nothing more important in our jobs than that,” says Mehlberg. “Any and all communication methods were on the table; we landed on creating the TIP as the right way to truly document and share that information for permanent reference.”

TAPPI summarizes the benefits of PIMA TIP 1502-01 as follows:

• Helps mills organize and provide information supporting the need for hands-on safety training.
• Provides multiple best practice examples of effective hands-on safety training.
• Presents audit and verification tools to ensure skills and understanding are mastered.

The guideline is available for purchase as a stand-alone and is also included in the Company and Individual Licenses. In anticipation of the PIMA Division’s efforts to produce more TIPs, the Standards group has assigned the division a new Subject Category number, 1500.

Mehlberg confirms that this is the first PIMA TIP on Safety—but it will not be the last. “We have suppliers and mills, and we’ve built a very engaged, cross-functional Safety Committee working together as a team. We are aligned on making this an annual cycle: Choose a safety topic for the year, use TAPPICon as an opportunity to discuss, and repeat the process.”

PIMA’s Safety Committee also leads an annual webinar jointly with the Pulp and Paper Safety Association (PPSA) as part of that group’s monthly webinar series. “It’s been a great collaboration,” says Mehlberg. “The work that we’ve done from a safety perspective has been really rewarding. It wraps back full circle with TAPPI and PIMA’s mission of adding value for our industries. What better topic to work on that truly has an impact than safety?”