Safety culture takes center stage at Q4 Biotechnology Manufacturers Forum meeting
Three industry leaders shared best practices for building world-class safety programs at the Dec. 1 meeting of the NCLifeSci Biotechnology Manufacturers Forum at the NC Biotechnology Center.
Bob Rezek, senior director of environmental health and safety at CSL Seqirus; Peter Self, HSE senior director for Eli Lilly's Research Triangle Park facility; and Lamont Smith, recognition program manager for the North Carolina Department of Labor, presented strategies for developing and maintaining strong safety cultures in biomanufacturing operations.
CSL Seqirus: Culture Drives Behavior
Rezek outlined CSL Seqirus's holistic approach to safety at the company's Holly Springs facility, the largest cell-based influenza vaccine manufacturing site in the world.
The company's safety program rests on three pillars:
- risk mitigation,
- effective management systems and
- people.
"You can have the best standards, you can have the best training, the best facilities, but if you don't have a culture that follows the rules and the guidelines and the SOPs and lives and models those behaviors that drive safety, they're just words on paper," Rezek said.
He emphasized that culture represents the set of basic assumptions and beliefs about reality that influences how people make decisions, feel, think and act.
"At the end of the day, culture drives behavior, and all of us in the EHS field are trying to influence behavior," Rezek said.
The Holly Springs site greets visitors with safety core principles and conducts annual health and safety week activities each October, including leadership messages and employee engagement activities such as scavenger hunts.
Eli Lilly: Leadership Sets the Tone
Self, a certified safety professional with more than 30 years of experience in biopharmaceutical and semiconductor manufacturing, focused on how safety culture follows organizational culture.
"In my experience, safety culture follows organizational culture," Self said. "I've never seen a facility that does great on quality and terrible on safety or vice versa. They seem to go hand in hand."
Self’s domain is the 900-employee Lilly RTP facility, which began operations in 2023 and produces GLP-1 medications through highly automated parental operations.
Self emphasized that safety must be operationalized as a core value from day one. At Lilly, the company mission statement declares "make medicines with safety first and quality always."
"It's only words if you don't have behaviors and actions to go along with it," Self said.
He outlined key elements of leadership commitment, starting with visible presence. Lilly leaders conduct monthly floor walks focused on specific topics such as working from heights and lockout tagout procedures.
"Leaders need to get out on the floor and talk with the people doing the work," Self said. "Don't lead from your desk. Don't go out there with a clipboard. Go out there to have conversations, real conversations, with individuals on the floor."
Self stressed the importance of building trust through how leaders respond to incidents and failures.
"How leaders respond to those unexpected events, failures, whatever terminology you want to call it, is going to have a profound impact on the culture and the speak-up culture," Self said.
He noted that employees on the floor understand safety risks better than any professional.
"The people on the floor, your maintenance technicians, the people on the floor, know their safety and they know what's going to get them better than any professional HSE professional is going to tell them or any leader is going to tell them," Self said.
Self also highlighted the need for accountability throughout the organization, particularly among middle managers and floor supervisors.
"You got to make sure that those folks are accountable and they have that shared responsibility for safety," Self said. "So you have it throughout the organization."
Carolina STAR: Partnership Model for Excellence
Smith presented the Carolina STAR program, a voluntary partnership between management, employees and the North Carolina Department of Labor designed to recognize worksites with exemplary safety and health programs.
The program currently includes 150 sites across North Carolina, with about 25 additional sites expressing interest and 10 active applications.
"Carolina STAR sites typically achieve injury and illness rates between 50 and 90% below the industry average," Smith said.
North Carolina's program sets higher standards than the federal version, requiring sites to be at 50% of the industry average compared to the federal requirement of simply being below the industry average.
Carolina STAR sites demonstrate world-class safety behaviors through employee ownership and engagement. Workers have the authority to stop work when they observe unsafe acts or conditions, participate in near-miss reporting and analyze injuries and illnesses.
"One thing about priority, we do have to prioritize, but priorities change, while values come from the heart and they remain the same," Smith said.
Benefits of program participation include significant reductions in injuries and illnesses, lower workers compensation costs, improved employee morale and engagement, higher productivity and stronger organizational reputation.
The program assigns safety and health responsibility to everyone at the worksite, from managers to front-line employees.
Following the presentations, attendees participated in facilitated discussions on five topics: providing safety culture, programs and resources for success, celebrating safety achievements, measuring safety performance and integrating safety into site objectives and performance reviews.
Information about the Carolina STAR program is available through the North Carolina Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Division.