By Kenneth Reily

Having
worked for DuPont in the past, a company that is nowadays considered
as one of the safest companies, I prioritize safety. Safety was
always on top of my mind when it came to doing anything work related.
I was in sales and all our sales meetings started with discussing
safety. We discussed our safety record, Europe’s safety record and
the global one. You did not want to end up in those statistics.

All
safety incidences and accidents were recorded and tracked throughout
the company. The trick is to do everything to avoid the near misses.
The Heinrich model indicates that for every 300 near misses you will
have 29 minor accidents and out of 29 minor accidents you will have
one major injury. By doing everything to reduce the near misses, you
should have fewer minor accidents and the fewer minor accidents would
lead to fewer major injuries.

For
company cars, we could only choose between car models that had a good
safety record. Tyres
needed to be of highest quality also with good safety record. We
needed to participate in winter driving training every 2nd
year. This was of course very good, to see how your car performs on
winter surfaces and on wet surfaces. You get respect for how speed
impacts the braking distance and how difficult it can be to control
the car at high speed on slippery surfaces.

We
always had to check that the tyres had the correct pressure, so that
we wouldn’t drive with under or over inflated tyres. We had studded
tyres during
the winter season for maximum grip on all surfaces, especially on
ice. Summer
tyres were
mounted quite late to avoid any reoccurring winter weather coming. If
there was bad weather and we had already changed tyres, we were
advised not to drive and stay home or take alternative
transportation.

Hands-free
sets were installed in all cars and this was at a very early stage of
the mobile phones and we were advised only to use the phone only when
it was business critical. It was already then thought that it could
be a distraction. I did work a summer in the UK at the office there
and I had to take a driving training to ensure that I could handle
the left-handed traffic. Only after passing the driving test I was
given a car during my stay there.

Knowing
that even the smallest accidents you would have with the car would be
reported made everyone working at DuPont to drive slower and more
safely. I did not have any accidents during my years working for
them. I did have one speeding ticket, but that was not reported. The
whole philosophy of prioritizing safety and actively work towards
ensuring that your driving and everything else that you do is one
with safety in mind.