Otis -- Elevating employee and customer safety to new standards

Otis -- Elevating employee and customer safety to new standards

Anamika Rath

Mumbai, July 8: In February 1999, an Otis Elevator Company India (Ltd) employee in Hyderabad met with a accident: he was knocked off his scooter by a truck while riding to work. While the scooter was badly smashed, the employee escaped with minor injuries because he was wearing a helmet.
The corporate response? Otis immediately compiled pictures of the employee's vehicle crushed under the truck. The smashed helmet was rushed to the head office, where it too was photographed. The pictures were then used to prepare a multi-coloured pamphlet which detailed the accident-and also highlighted another accident, where an Otis employee in Sao Paulo, Brazil, died because he was not wearing a hard-hat at a job-site.

This communication was then inserted in each employee's playslip. Says deputy general manager, communications, Otis India Aloysius Lobo: ``This way we ensured that not only the employee read the message, but also his family. So that the next time he forgot to wear his helmet on the way to work, atleast his wife could remind him.'' The smashed helmet was also sent to all regional offices for employees to see the impact the helmet had absorbed-and to graphically imagine what would have been the condition of the employee's head had he not worn the helmet.

Gory and gruesome? Not really, this is just Otis walking the talk. For, the elevator manufacturer has not just adopted `safety' as a value to be associated with the Otis brand by the external customer, but the Otis Elevator Company India (Ltd), is now practicing what it preaches to its internal customers too. Thus safety as a concept is not just limited to the shopfloor, but is extended to erecting, installing, and servicing elevators-and in terms of employees, it means not just following safety norms during working hours but also beyond.

Says Otis India managing director R R Bajaj: ``The critical nature of safety cannot be over-emphasised. At Otis, it is non-negotiable. It is the culture here.'' Otis has thus set-up a massive ``safetyinfrastructure'' consisting of policies, standards, guidelines and a carrot-and-stick mechanism which punishes the non-conformers, and awards the safety practitioners. Consider how Otis' internal and external customers are made to play safe:

All employees who own two-wheelers are required to wear a helmet, the cost of which is fully reimbursed by the company.

All employees who own cars are required to use a seat belt. Otis does not take delivery of a car unless the seat belts are in place. Any guest or visitor using an Otis manager's car and sitting next to the driver has to use the seat belt too.

Any employee whose job involves field work is provided with safety gear called Personal Protective Equipment, worth Rs 7,000 free of cost, by the company. This includes the usual hard hat, safety goggles, ear plugs (need-based issue), a full body harness, rope grabber, lifeline, backbelts, gloves, shoes etc. All managers visiting job-sites have to wear hard-hats.

Whenever an accident ora near-miss takes place, the company issues a ``Safety Flash'' to all employees which graphically describes the accident, the causes, and the precautions to be taken.

The company's in-house magazine always includes a section on safety. This section describes specific accidents which have taken place, the causes, and the preventive measures.

Otis provides its customers with a free annual equipment check purely from the safety point of view.

Safety audits at building sites (minimum of one per month) are conducted by the managing director, all general managers and those in line functions up to supervisor level.

Otis imparts safety-related training free of charge to liftmen and watchmen of buildings where Otis elevators are installed and the residents request such a training.

Local Fire Departments also receive training from Otis on how to save people trapped in elevators when a fire breaks out.

Non-compliance has its penalties. Violators for example, are fined up to Rs 500 anoffense. Says Lobo: ``A fine is preferable. It is worse if you are ticked off. It has wide ramifications if an opinion forms that you are not safety conscious.''

To ensure that compliance is strict, Otis India imparts regular safety training: each employee has to undergo a minimum of 40 hours of training before he or she can even touch an elevator. In fact, the job-site safety standards hand-book, which is given to all employees on the field, runs into 56 pages.

The cost of safety? Between 1996 and 1998, Otis India has spent Rs 5.80 crore on safety standards implementation alone. But then the rewards are big too, in terms of the company's monthly tracking of the Lost Time Accident Rate and the Severity Rate, through which it keeps a tab on how many man-days were lost because employees were involved in accidents, job-related or not.

The company claims that its Lost Time Accident Rate-LTA Rate is the number of accidents that happen per 100 employees in a year-which stood at 6.2 in 1992, had fallen to just1.1 in 1998. Similarly, its Severity Rate -- the Severity Rate is the number of days lost due to accidents per 100 employees in a year -- which was 78.2 in 1992, had plummeted to 21.4 in 1998.

But then safety is hardly a concept Otis has learnt recently. The first words that Elisha Gravis Otis said when he demonstrated his safety hoist - which heralded the invention of the elevator -- in 1853 at Crystal Palace Hotel, New York, were: ``All safe gentlemen.'

No wonder then, that Otis's invention was registered as a safety elevator. And no wonder, that Otis which operates in 222 countries, employs more than 60,000 people, who speak over two dozen languages, has one word which every one understands: safety.

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