Kevin McMenimen:

Welcome everybody. Hello and welcome everybody to our webinar on store safety. I'm Kevin McMenimen with Loss Prevention Magazine.

Jacque Brittain:

And I'm Jacque Brittain with the Loss Prevention Magazine.

Kevin McMenimen:

And we're going to have a really fun conversation I think today. And if that wasn't what you were here for, then you didn't come to the right place because you don't probably associate safety and fun. But the folks that we're going to talk to today definitely really take that to the next level when it comes to associate engagement and really engaging with employees in the stores to create that culture of safety. So pretty excited about our speakers today. I'm going to get to introducing them in just a moment. But first, a couple of housekeeping items and to start with a huge thank you to our sponsors NetWatch, HiveWatch and LiveView Technologies. Keep in mind everybody that without sponsors like these great folks we can't do these educational sessions. So big thank you to them, and please do check them out. A little bit about NetWatch. NetWatch is a proactive video and monitoring solution, which provides retail businesses with a highly effective and cost-efficient way to stop criminal activity in its tracks by leveraging sophisticated machine learning analytics and highly trained US-based innovation specialists.

Pro-active video monitoring detects suspicious activity and deters would be criminals with live personalized audio warnings. Visit netwatchusa.com to learn how proactive video monitoring can prevent break-ins, loitering, and other criminal activity at your retail store or shopping center. Next up is LiveView. LVT provides a user-friendly enterprise grade safety and security ecosystem that can quickly and easily secure any physical environment through the use of intelligent automation and actionable insights. Customers love that LVT's fixed position and mobile security units can be deployed just about anywhere and can be up and running in a matter of minutes. And thanks to their proprietary video management system, users can easily control their security units remotely, set up automated actions, and access live and recorded video feeds 24/7. Check them out at LVT.com. And lastly, we have HiveWatch. HiveWatch is focused on helping organizations keep their employees and customers safe. Having the appropriate security programs with the right technologies in place are vital to achieving safety.

HiveWatch can help retailers increase safety through two offerings. The first ever security fusion platform. HiveWatch works with existing security systems, enabling users to reduce noise and add an intelligent orchestration layer to help companies manage their current security programs. HiveWatch is the operating system for physical security. HiveWatch's Swarm is a virtual global security operation center. Swarm utilizes HiveWatch's own in-house state-of-the-art GSOC, and train team to service organizations with limited security resources or those looking to make changes and transitions with their existing programs. The HiveWatch team can help design and implement a custom program to complement individual needs of our customers. Visit www.hivewatch.com to request a demo. So thank you again to our sponsors and thank you to our education sponsor, the Loss Prevention Foundation. If you are not certified already, I ask you why, why you're not certified. Let's get out there. Loss prevention Qualified for those people just starting out in the industry.

Loss prevention Certified LPC for those who have a little more loss prevention experience. If you are certified on either LPQ or LPC, you get three CEU credits for today's session. Don't miss out on those. Also, before we get started, if you're not already getting Loss Prevention Magazine, I again ask you why. It's free. Sign up today to Loss Prevention Magazine through www.losspreventionmedia.com. Get a free magazine sent to your home. And if you're thinking to yourself, I used to get the magazine but I don't get it anymore, well submit that subscription again and let's make sure we get you back on the list so you can get that. Again. It's today. And today, not only no, today not only it's free. It's free every day. So I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that it was free only today, at least this time. Usually I lie to you.

All right, next LP portal. If you haven't downloaded the LP portal, make sure you go to your Google Play Store or the iOS Apple Store and download LP portal for just about everything loss prevention, all in one cool little mobile app. It's got feeds from LP Magazine, it's got webinars, podcasts, links to calendars, to a number of the associations, to all of the orcas. If you're into ORC, definitely download the LP portal app today. And just a quick note about the LP Hall. Next week we'll be announcing the winners for the LP Leader of the Year, team of the year, the investigation of the year, investigator of the year, solution partner of the year, solution provider, innovator of the year. Make sure you tune in to lphall.com and see who all the winners are. Check out the finalists today at lphall.com.

Jacque Brittain:

We'll be doing that from Relo, right Kevin?

Kevin McMenimen:

We will. We're going to be actually doing this live from Relo and we've got a number of folks from across the industry that are going to help us make the announcements and open those envelopes and announce those meetings. So pretty excited about that. And last but not least, before we get started, Jacque, you want to tell them the dos and don'ts here?

Jacque Brittain:

Okay. For everybody out there, this webinar will be recorded and made available in a webinar and a podcast through losspreventionmedia.com. Everybody will be muted during the presentation. You'll see at the bottom of your page, there's a series of widgets down there. There's a chat that we'll be monitoring. There's a Q&A, which is where we'd like you to submit any questions that we have. This is intended to be an interactive presentation, so please, we're encouraging you to put some questions out there for us. We'll try to answer all of your questions, but if we run out of time, we will still try to get the answers out through articles, future webinars, and other resources to make sure that we get your questions answered.

Kevin McMenimen:

Excellent. All right, that's enough of the housekeeping stuff and the dos and don'ts. Let's get right onto it and let's start talking safety. So I'm very excited to introduce our two speakers for today, Tina Baumann, who's with Kroger and Hank Jones who is with Lowe's. Welcome to Tina and Hank, thanks for joining us today.

Tina Baumann:

Thanks for having us.

Kevin McMenimen:

Very excited to be speaking with you both. Tina, I think we're going to start with you. So the way we're going to do today's session, let's talk a little bit about safety programs in general and let's talk about the program at Kroger. Let's talk about some of the focuses that you guys have there. And then we're going to switch over to Hank. Hank we'll talk to you about a little bit of the same. And then let's have a sort of an interactive discussion about some of those critical and key elements when it comes to getting that associate engagement and how you're making that outreach to your employee base to make them part of not just listening to the message but becoming part of the message and an advocate for it. So Tina, let's start with you.

Tina Baumann:

All right, so very excited to be here. So thanks again for having me. Introducing Kroger's brand new safety program. Our current program that we had, we had for 21 years and it did an amazing job. We are able to reduce accidents and incidents, which is what it focused on. But what we wanted to do this year, starting this year, is we wanted to flip the switch and instead of doing all our concentration on reducing incidents and accidents, we wanted to flip it to the personal side of safety because the personal side of safety is really, if you think about it, the most important reason for someone to work safe. It's all about getting them home to their families each and every day the same way that they came in, if not even better. So you'll see in our new program in the middle, we launched it this past February.

I'm sitting in our store in Salem, Indiana right now where we just went through our new All Safe program with the store leadership and the associates here, and it's all about making sure that our associates are aware. So if you think of an exclamation point for example, that's the universal symbol for safety. And we all know if we get something with an exclamation point, it's either really important or really excited about it. All Safe fits in both of those categories. And then if you look at our logo, you'll see the heart that Kroger has everywhere, and that's our feed the human spirit heart. We stopped at our color orange because orange represents our core values that we live by each and every day of respect and safety. And then we have the hand underneath it just to show support. We're really concentrating on just showing that we care for everyone.

Again, the personal side of safety, making sure our associates are always alert to their surroundings and that we're acknowledging that safe behavior. We have a few different ways that we're going to measure success, and the first and foremost is associate engagement. Getting out there and making sure that our associates understand our new program because we're not just focusing on OSHA compliance, we're focusing on all aspects of safety. We're focusing on security, safety, inclusion. All of that comes into making sure that our associates are safe each and every day. We put a training calendar together to make sure that they knew what they needed to be trained on when, and that has been getting raving reviews. So just very excited about the whole program and what we're doing. And if you flip to the next slide, this just shows something that we started with. This is how we introduced All Safe because one of the things we wanted to find out is what was important to our associates?

Why do I work safe? And I challenge you to think about that for yourself because at the end of the day, safety starts with me or safety starts with you. And so what we did is we put up a sign as simple as the one you see that says, why do I work safe? And we ask all of our associates to put post-it notes up of why do they work safe, what was important to them? Of course, we got all the canned answers that you expect like it's our bottom line, we want to protect our co-workers, we want to protect our customers. All of those are very important. We want to make sure that we're doing all of that as well. But at the end of the day, the really most important reason that we work safe again, is to go home to our families.

So we wanted to make sure that our associates knew that what was important to them was important to us, and we want to make sure that they take care of their families by taking care of themselves. The tagline I always say in the store, it's okay to be stingy with safety. So take care of number one first and then we'll work on the other ones. We have this now out. This is a slides a little bit dated, but this is now out in all 22 of our divisions. And I am out in all the divisions. I travel about every other week to make sure that our associates understand the program and that we're starting to see the engagement in the program. So very excited about All Safe. And with that, Kevin, I can turn it back to you to answer any questions.

Kevin McMenimen:

Well, before we go over to Hank, let's just touch on a few of the... What are some of the key focuses for Kroger when it comes to safety? We talk about all of the different things that can go wrong in the stores from anywhere from slips and falls to active threats, to when we talk about attitudes and the behaviors that we have in the stores sometimes, and especially as we've all gone through COVID and a number of those issues related to that. What are some of the key focuses for your safety program at Kroger?

Tina Baumann:

So first and foremost, it's our associates making sure that we take care of them each and every day. And then that extends out to our customers. We are doing something a little different this year when it comes to a spill on the floor, making sure that we're recognizing that we're taking care of it right away instead of calling somebody else to come clean up the spill, which is something that we used to do in the past. Now the associates that are there, they know where our spill magic kits are. They come out, they clean it up so we can continue to protect our customers. The other thing that we are looking at, or not looking at, but that we're doing this year, if you think of active threats coming into our stores, which I'm sure all of you know, we have had quite a few of them over the last year and a half, four to be exact.

And when we think of the active threats coming towards or coming into our stores, one of the thing that we're really working on with our associates is making sure that they know multiple ways out no matter where they are in the stores. We're doing things like making it fun, like doing a scavenger hunt, for example, to understand where their exits are, where our fire extinguishers are, eye wash stations, whatever it may be. So really just concentrating on the education side to make sure that our associates understand the importance of them taking all of their compliance training, but then taking that training and implementing it into their everyday life. That's really the most important side of it. We look at Kroger's core values and safety is our number one priority. Safety, taking care of our associates, our customers, visitors, vendors, and patients is our number one priority each and everyday.
Jacque Brittain:

Tina, I would add here, and I know that Hank would agree with this, one of the most important things as well is corporate commitment and the willingness that your teams see that you're willing to get out there and make sure that the message is spread and that the message is heard. Why don't you tell us where you are today?

‍Tina Baumann:

So today I'm in one of our stores. It's one of our JayC stores in Salem, Indiana. And I am in the process of walking our Louisville division, which this store falls into that division and making sure that, it's like I'm on a campaign trail. I'm making sure that we're marketing the All Safe plan. Again, we just rolled this out early this year, so we are going to every store in the divisions to make sure that they understand the plan and that they understand the process and really they understand that their personal safety is most important.

I have a team of four in the Louisville division this week, so we're very excited to get out in the stores and talk with the associates. And it's fun when you're talking to the associates because you ask them the question again, why do you work safe? And they're going to give you the answer that they think you want until you ask them to dig a little deeper. And then when you ask, well, what's on the outside of these four walls that's most important to you? That's when their eyes light up and they're like, oh, well my kids or my husband or my dog. I've had some silly answers like the baseball field. I love playing ball. If that's what's most important to them, that's what most important to us.

Kevin McMenimen:

That's great. That's great. Hank, let's switch over and let's talk a little bit about the program at Lowe's and all the things you've done there. I know I saw you night long we started talking about culture shift and you've done a rather remarkable job at changing the culture over at Lowe's and really making some incredible traction on how the associates get involved with the safety message and the overall safety culture at Lowe's.

Hank Jones:

Yeah, we really shook things up, but first I want to negotiate that three credits. Can I get six? [inaudible 00:17:14] Just kidding. So I was really pleased I looked at the participant list, and so there are several individuals who actually have some Lowe's experience and helped us build what was the best program ever, asset protection, loss prevention as we all used to call it, which is inclusive of safety. So our journey, I've been at Lowe's for 20 plus years, and so I was here when I was 10 years old and started plugging away at making safety different at Lowe's. And this all part of my leadership story. But came to Lowe's and I got a background in traditional environmental health and safety and I was like black and white, here's the regulation, if you can't do it, we should fire you and get somebody that can do it.

Really, really like traditional and very narrow-minded approach to safety. And that stuck with me for years and years and years until I was influenced by the right leader and just got different exposure in life and your value systems change. And I used to come at it from a, Well Kevin, you're an idiot. You got hurt. I don't know. And I'm just being honest. I had a really narrow-minded view of safety and it was like people got hurt because well, they just weren't paying attention. It's all the fault of the person. And as you get older and you get some exposure and you figure out what's going on and you get married and you have kids and your value set changes and you're taking care of your little people and going like, oh, wait, if they get hurt, it's all on me. So I had that epiphany at Lowe's going like, hey, I'm the top of the food chain here when it comes to environmental health and safety.

If something happens, it's on me. I didn't advocate strong enough, I didn't hustle, I didn't get the capital, I didn't do the thing, I didn't hit the bell loud enough that our leadership team would hear. And so it completely changed my perspective. So we went from having a really good program, which like I said, some of the participants were part of building a really good program, great, border ground great. And then through just me maturing and starting to think about how I bring me to my job, not just how I do my job, but how I bring, everybody has special things about them. Tina's got special things, we all got things that we bring to the job. What do I want to bring to the job and how do I want to mix this up? So I started to evaluate how are we're going to go from a really good program, a really strong program, really well-respected program to knocking this thing out of the park.

Luckily had a lot of really supportive leaders at the time and a really great team, and they really responded to wanting to shake things up. So you think about it, and we talked about this a little bit previously, you think about it, and safety is not a fun thing. People do not gravitate towards safety. They're a very small section of humanity that's like, I love this, but by and large, when you're talking to a line level associate and you're like, oh my God, we're going to talk about safety. You're going to be so pumped about this, everybody's like just let me do my LMS course and go about my business.

Kevin McMenimen:

[Inaudible 00:20:33].

Hank Jones:

Yeah, linear education and I'm back to earning my wage for, again, to Tina's point, whatever it is you do outside of work, if it's beer money, if it's kids, if it's Harley's, baseball, it doesn't make a difference.

Everybody's got something special. And so we just broke the whole egg and started from scratch, and I decided that safety doesn't have to be this ominous, horrible, I've got to be in a tuxedo and talking about it and scaring people. You got to make it something that people want to participate in. And for a lot of years, we tried to use the fun word in regards to safety, and everybody was like, you can't have fun while you're teaching safety or asking people to do things or talking about awareness. This is too important to have fun. And I was like, well, it's too important to not have fun because if we're not having fun and I'm not smiling and I'm not making myself giggle every day by the silly stuff in the background, what we do if I'm not having fun, it radiates through in everything that we publish, every program, every procedure, even if it's a linear flat training file that still doesn't have to be terrible.

You can make that interesting to our weekly broadcast, to our safety meetings, the content, the background that we use, what we ask people to do, we're constantly trying to, it sounds terrible, but it comes down to marketing safety and socially engineering safety. Why do I want to play this game when I have 100 things that I'm responsible for? Why is your thing the most critical thing? Why do I get top billing? And it's because it's fun and because it's people and it's our most important asset. If we can't take care of them, everything that Tina said, spot on Tina, then we don't unlock discretionary effort. And I still joke around with our former VP. I joke around with my current VP that if we do safety right, if we authentically, authentically care for people and talk to people the way they want to be talked to, right?

It's stigma, respect, it's the golden rule. It's whatever you want to call it. And if we don't bring you in and say, hey, we're going to have fun while you learn this stuff to the point where you don't even know you're learning stuff because you're having so much fun because this guy who has got this branded beard and everything out there in the Lowe's world, and if any of you are linked with me on LinkedIn, you'll see this all the time. You don't even know you're learning safety. And that's my goal. Make it so engaging and fun and credible that at the end of the day, you don't even know that you learn something and you learn something. And I don't want to misrepresent and say, this is all me. I've got a very creative team who likes to poke a whole lot of fun at me, and luckily I've got an ego that's able to handle some of those road bumps.

But we really, if I could boil it down to one thing, it's fun. We started off our journey at Lowe's and compliance and regulatory stuff, auditing, which is all critical components of a safety program, but none of that gets you culture. What gets you culture is Keenan and Tina was saying culture is tying in the values. Culture is showing people what the behaviors are in the different scenarios. Culture is not just buying you a new piece of equipment. Culture is saying, hey, I didn't just buy you a handcart. We hand engineered this thing with a bunch of Lowe's associates to give you the handcart that is most able to do the job that you need to do, not just any handcart. We thought about it, here are all the people that participated in the engineering design and we built this thing from ground up. And people are like, oh my gosh.

And then when I send it to you, I send it to you with a personalized note from me in this knucklehead board who is plank, Hank and plank, very original and creative. We send you a personalized note to your store and say, hey, this piece of equipment was engineered by this group of people. It's for you. Here's what it's going to do for you. Please take care of it. If you have any feedback, comments or we can make this better and make your job, and I can't use this out in the real world, but if there's any way we can make your job suck less by reengineering this equipment, get it to me and I will take care of it, or I'll respond to you or tell you what the story is. And so I don't know, I could just go and go and go.

I get super pumped up about it. I'll tell you that we had a leadership change. Basically our entire ELT cycled out probably three-ish, four years ago. And that made a world of good. That does world good because that was in between this transformational change in how we do our business and safety and environmental health because the new folks came in and they were like, yeah. You know what? You're not going to always have the best ROI on the cap that you're requesting, but as long as you have a competitive ROI with something else, we know that people are the only thing that keep this rolling. And if we can capture people and we can do the safety thing, and I'm going back to my VP conversations, if we can unlock discretionary effort and build that trust and confidence with our associate base, then I can fix shrink.

I'm just kidding. Everybody's going to lose their minds. I'm not going to fix shrink. But you think about it, and this is just part of my household, is part of how I make things work. If we've got a disengaged associate population and they've got a need and they've got an opportunity, they're going to take advantage of the company. But if you've got an engaged associate population that goes, you know what? I hate Hank but I know that he cares about me because I see it and I hear it all the time. I've got a need and I've got an opportunity, but now I've got some stickiness with the company because I know they're advocating on my behalf consistently. It's not going to solve shrink, but this is just a theory I'm working on. I don't have any data to back that up, but you know what I'm saying.

If we can credible credibly approach this, give you the equipment that you need, show you what we're doing, just be forthright with you consistently, just authentically communicating and having a little fun with it changes the dynamic of the whole program and it passes on to our customers as well. I hardly ever, hardly ever do I talk about customer safety because our associate safety program is so strong and if we build out the right way, it automatically transitions over to our vendor community because we've got people that are empowered and knowledgeable and smiling, and I always talk about smiling man. Smile, tell a joke, make somebody's load a little bit lighter every single day you come to work. That just transitions out to everybody else, transitions into sales. I can't prove it. Transitions into likelihood to return or customer satisfaction or however you measure it. So we're just doing a lot of different and wacky stuff, a lot of which is, and this was me getting out of my comfort zone.

I hate social media, I'll be the first to tell you. But man, if I'm not on social media every day, every single day, and I don't want to be in front of a video camera, never have. I want to be the regulatory guy, fix some things in the background and being a quiet hero, but I'm on video every single week, two, three times a week. Some things more ridiculous and asinine than others, but it's all about creating some shtick and creating that marketing, which parlays into that social engineering. You want to play the game because you want to play the game. You want to be part of something special. You want me to call you out in a video and be like, this is awesome. You want marquee lights, you want your name in marquee Lights. So just a bunch of different shtick. And we probably the wacky stuff that we do, we probably have a 70% hit rate.

There's some stuff that we bumble into that we're like, ooh, that was terrible. But if you get a 70% hit rate on any marketing scheme, that's pretty good. We did some stuff for several months where we talked about, we just stumbled into it that people still love wrestling. And I was like, I was flabbergasted. I was like, I didn't know people... I had no idea. I hadn't watched wrestling since I was in sixth grade. And people loved responded to a little teeny tiny statement that I sent a little video and we're like, all right, let's run this out. Can we turn old school wrestling into hook it into the safety campaign somehow or push it out? And we ran something for three or four months and people ate it up and loved it. We were getting write-ins about favorite wrestlers and stories about things that happened as they were kids.

And you're like, oh, we got a hook. We just set the hook. So it's not perfect, but we've got some really amazing stuff going on. But it's really amazing. It's hard to think what's the next thing. Social media, you can only do so much on social media because you don't want people interacting too much. So I have to have a presence and I got to be very cognizant of what I put out there. A lot of the stuff is behind the line. Social media is just because when I say kids very loosely where the kids are interacting. So a lot of stuff, we're doing these 62nd videos every single week and we know that we've got to push into shorter format stuff, TikTok style.

And so you're not going to see me on TikTok anytime soon because that's terrible things happen on TikTok. But we can take TikTok style communications or current trends in TikTok, we can rip it and we can put it into a 15-second spot and push it out in little packets of information. And I say kids loosely, the kids are going to go, oh my gosh, that old guy that he's doing the thing that I just saw the other day. And it's all G rated, it's all Disney. I got a disclaimer on everything I do. So anyway, I get excited. I'm sorry, you got to rein me in, Kevin.

Kevin McMenimen:

Well, there's a lot to be said though about, there's a couple of things you're touching on because one, it's about marketing safety, but even more so, and I think both of you have hit on this, that it's about marketing the fact that we care about you, that as the company, we care about you and that stickiness that can help grow not only from a shrink perspective, that they're happy to be there, they know that you care and they don't necessarily want to do bad things as often, but maybe they don't want to leave either.

And in this environment, it's so hard to get good people and to get any people in some cases. So how important to tie the safety message into all of that and say, if we can make sure that people know that we care, and in that message also be able to let them know how to stay safe and get home to their families. Tina, as you've said, I think there's so much to be said there. It's funny because Tina is out in the stores right now and she's going to store to store Hank, you're banned from the stores right now aren't you?

Hank Jones:

Self-imposed ban.

Kevin McMenimen:

You're like, you're not allowed to go out in the stores because you're a distraction. You're a disruption, right? So I think that says a lot though, right? It sounds funny to say it, but tell them why you can't go out in the stores because...

Hank Jones:

Well, because I've forced my way into being a C-level low celebrity. So I mean, they have to watch me on these videos every week and they've got to answer questions and do all this stuff. So people see somebody on the TV and they think that, oh, you're a real actor. And I'm like, no, I'm not a real actor. But you go into stores and everybody just wants to grab five minutes with you. And again, it goes back to credible messaging. I talk to our entire associate population the same way I'm talking to this group. I mean, I got one gear and it's excited and happy and ready to roll. And so I go to stores and they just get real pumped to see me coming into the stores. I mean, I can tell you so many funny stories. I made mention of the fact last fall that I was right, everybody likes to talk about pumpkin spice and bots, pumpkin spice, everything.

So a little snippet on a video and I was like, oh, hey, my wife handed me some ChapStick. It's pumpkin spice. Just a really random comment. And I was like, I can't stand it, but boy am I waiting for Shamrock Shakes to come around. And one little snippet one time and stores rang me consistently about Shamrock Shakes, and I was out visiting stores in, where was I? I was in Philly, Jersey and the first store I went to, I had a lady who was so pumped that she brought in a blender and she had some, they know I'm from Pennsylvania as well, so they brought in some Bonnie Bell ice cream, and she handmade me a Shamrock Shake at 7:00 AM and I'm like, this is so good. What are we doing here? But just, again, there's schtick, but the credibility and the authenticity is what it's got to be all about in your messaging.

If it's not that, if you're not talking to somebody like their uncle or their grandpa or whoever that person is that they most trust, then it just doesn't work. And I think a lot of times when we try to transition into video outside of a straight linear learning path, we get a whole lot of very stodgy, like I'm reading from a teleprompter stuff like that, and I've got to hit all 10 points and it just comes across as insincere and there's no heartstrings. And I think that's a crisis all across any big corporations. So we are really, really cognizant of that. We really try to do our best to keep stuff simple, to keep it short, to keep it direct, and most importantly, just to keep it fun or a little bit irreverent. But again, tagline, always G-rated, always Disney.

I end segments. I don't know how this started. I end segments with a dad joke. I've never told a dad joke in my life. Some people on here will know this. I'm more of a smart ass kind of guy. But we started, one of my guys was like, hey, you got to start telling dad jokes at the end of every segment. It'll take you five seconds. And I was like, I hate it, but yeah, let's try it and see what kind of feedback we get. And we started throwing dad jokes out and people lost their minds. And you're like, well, what does that do with safety? It doesn't do anything with safety, but people come back. They can't wait to watch the segments to hear the dad jokes. Now, I've transitioned in, I get probably 30 or 40 dad jokes a week emailed to me directly from Jimmy that collects carts.

And every one of them I answer and I'm like, hey, that's a cool joke. It's not G rated. I can't tell it to my kids. You're never going to see it. And let me tell you why, but why don't you submit me another joke and submit me a safety topic? And if it's good enough, if it passed to this, I tell them, there's this really high brow system that we use to evaluate jokes, but there isn't and they know that. But if it passes, I'm going to put your face up there at the end of my broadcast, I'm going to tell them what store you're in. I'm going to tell them your joke and I'm going to tell them your safety tip.

People have lost their minds about it now. We started doing joke competitions again, it doesn't have anything to do with safety, but it's just about baiting and getting people in. And once you get them past the door, they're in and they keep showing back up because we keep changing the content out. And I'll tell you, if you endeavor to go down this road, be willing to throw every bit of energy that you have into it. It's not a 50 hour a week commitment because you're trying to steer a behemoth and you're trying to steer a very fickle, and I don't want to say fan base, but employee population with a whole lot of diversity. And so you got to throw yourself at it. You got to always be looking for new content. You got to always be thinking about the words you say who you might offend.

And it's been really educational for me to put myself in a spotlight because I've learned so much where I will get direct feedback from associates. They're like, you cannot say this. I'm like, "Okay, I didn't know that. You've educated me. I'll come back on next week and I'll say, Hey, I apologize." I said this, I didn't even know that was a word that would offend any. What did I say? I said one, the example I was talking about going in shagging shopping carts in the parking lot, and I had some British people that were like, whoa, no, no. And I was like, I didn't even, I'm not thinking Austin Powers man. I'm thinking shagging fly balls and grabbing carts. That's how I said it when I grew up and worked at a grocery store. But to come back and authentically apologize and go, wasn't even thinking, I'm sorry. You get a lot of credibility for that. People go, oh, it's not just some corporate putz. He's actually paying attention.

Jacque Brittain:

So if you guys had to look at this, I mean, both of you have a tremendous amount of experience. You've been doing this for a long time. These are larger companies, but we have some folks here that are part of our participant group today that maybe they've taken on safety for the first time based on what's happened with the pandemic or whatever or they're more of a company that doesn't have a formalized program and they're looking to really build something. If you had to pick two or three things that you would recommend that they start with, what would it be?

Kevin McMenimen:

Tina, let's start with you.

Tina Baumann:

With me? Couple things that I would recommend that you start with is getting out and talking to your population first. I took the senior manager role over safety with Kroger about a year and a half ago, and I spent all last year being out in the divisions, understanding where the pain points were, understanding what they were really looking for, what they understood, what they didn't understand, and really just taking in the feedback. And that's not always easy. It's not always easy for people to tell you, this program stinks. We need to do something different. So took all their feedback and brought it back to my team, and then developed a council of some of our associates to run things past and to start developing what can we do differently to take care of all this feedback, to change the program, to make it more engaging, but to make it more important to our associates so they want to be involved.

I can't wait until I get to where Hank is. I'm so very excited to get to that point. Right now I'm just pulling people in. So I'm at the very start of rolling out a new program, so I can't wait. All the stories Hank shares, I sit here and giggle because I'm like, oh my gosh, that's going to be me in a couple years. I can't wait. It's going to be fun. So just really my recommendation first steps is you got to understand where you are before you can figure out where you need to go and that takes a lot of time and energy. As Hank said, it's not a 50 hour a week job. This is my life.

Making sure that I'm available at any time of day to answer any type of question, making sure that we are taking feedback, we're making changes, and then we're going back to those individuals that gave us the feedback and saying, you know what? You gave us a great idea. Thanks for that feedback. This is what we're doing instead, tell us what you think. And just building that relationship, building the trust with everyone in our divisions has been just a great way for us to start. And I think because I took that year to really just understand what was going on out in all of our divisions that now the All Safe program is really taken off and everyone's excited about it. So I think that was a big step for us.

Kevin McMenimen:

I wonder if there's an element of that. There's a question that we had here from Matthew in "How do you engage a disinterested owner of a store to be interested in the safety of their store?" And I'm wondering if there is a perfect example of get that buy-in, right? So what is it about the safety program that doesn't work for you or that you don't like, and maybe making them part of the conversation can help to develop that overall interest. I mean, there should be some pieces that are pretty obvious, right? Because when it comes to, we don't want our employees getting hurt, we don't want our customers getting hurt, we don't want the brand issues that come with all of that. So it shouldn't be that hard to carry them over that line. But do you think that would be part of it?

Tina Baumann:

Absolutely. In fact, I ran into that in one of our stores earlier today, and it was a smaller store, and the assistant store leader was a little disgruntled, had a lot of priorities, and then, oh, by the way, here comes the senior manager of our safety to walk the store with them. So it was all about understanding their priorities first and making sure that they knew that I cared that they had other things going on because the president of the division is walking the same stores tomorrow that I'm walking today. But what we were able to do is I got him, as you said, Kevin involved in the conversations with the associates. And at the end of the store walk, he looked at me and he's like, "Oh my gosh." He goes, "Tina, thank you so much." He goes, "I never knew that Debbie and the deli was going through so many personal things that were so important to her, but yet she was still running my deli as top of her priority list when really it probably should have failed to second because what her husband was going through."

So he told me that by being able to understand the personal side of people, it just gave him a whole new outlook on the All Safe program and was able to take that information. And then he really started buying into the program. As I said, once you get the personal side, all those other numbers are coming. Like Hank said, he has a lot of fun with it. All those numbers with reduction of incidents and accidents will follow once you bring the people in because they want to work safe not only for themselves and their family, but once you get them brought in, they want to work safe for you as well because it's fun and they know you care.

And that's what we're in the process of doing with all of our store leaders today and through the next few months is we're out in the stores is really pushing that message of we care because we're human. We have families. That's why I work safe. I have a beautiful six-month-old granddaughter. She is the light of my life. I want to see her every day. That's why I work safe. So that's why we started the messaging the way we did.

Kevin McMenimen:

And you've got quite a journey too, because you've got a, it's a Kroger brand, but you own, what is it? 20 some odd different brands underneath-

Tina Baumann:

24.

Kevin McMenimen:

That have their own sort of individual cultures and their own individual branding and so forth. So there's a little bit of a hurdle there to kind of rope in. I imagine sometimes it might be like herding cats a little bit because everybody's going in their own direction, but eventually you've got to put the bowl on the floor and get them to all come in and have some tuna or something all together.

Tina Baumann:

Yeah, absolutely. And you bring up a great point. No matter what brand of store that you shop in across the United States with Kroger, we're all going to have the same consistent message now, whereas before, they were all a little bit different, but now we're pulled them all together. We're all consistent, we're all going to be having that same message going out to our associates, customers, visitors, vendors, patients, whoever it is that comes into our stores.

Kevin McMenimen:

Excellent. Hank, let's jump back to... I know you got some backgrounds, we didn't do slides with you. So there's some cool images that I know you can share with us and maybe with both of you can talk a little bit about the culture shift in the organizations as well and what that journey's been like from getting the buy-in to have these programs to spend the money on safety apparatus and things like that.

Hank Jones:

So you tell me which question you want me to answer, Kevin.

Kevin McMenimen:

So go ahead. So start with, walk us through some of the different elements of the program. Like Tina said, she's not quite there yet. She's just launching their program. You've had this underway. Tell us about some of the things that you guys are doing and how you're approaching some of these topics would be great from both of you as well.

Hank Jones:

So I would like to, if we could, go back to some of the companies that maybe aren't as far along as we are and maybe are not as resourced and maybe tie that back into some of the crazy stuff that we're doing. So I mean, if you're early on, you're starting a program, we've all been there. You got to figure out where you are first and do you understand safety, right? Because I didn't. I trained professional, went to college for it, math, science, safety nerd, and I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what I thought about it, I didn't understand how to make safety work. So I would think the first thing you got to do is evaluate where you are. And do you actually believe that every incident that happens, incident not accident, words matter, that every incident that happens at your location, you are responsible for.

In some way, shape or form you have failed that person. And if you don't, and this is out there in literature, Campbell Institute, all kinds of safety nerd magazines, stuff like that. But if you don't feel that, then you need to educate yourself a little bit about some deep root safety, not book safety. You got to ask where your company is. What do they want you to solve. Somebody says, "Hey, good news, Tina, you're in charge of safety." Cool. What does that mean to you? What am I going to be evaluated on? Do you want me to do regulatory stuff? Because you got to have regulatory stuff. You got to have audits. That's bones of the program, but that stuff isn't going to get your big reductions in injury. So you got to find out where you are. You got to find out where your company is and what their expectations are of you and what you're solving for.

If somebody comes and says, "Hey, we hired you Tina because we had these two big OSHA things and we really need to get on good ground with OSHA or this regulatory agency" that's a different starting point. If they go, "We just really feel compelled. We are injured too many people. It's not a money thing, it's our family." Oh, that's a totally different story. So I would say that you start there when you're first coming into the role, when you first get the responsibility, maybe that'll help you compress your learning curve a little bit and how you're going to go after it. And then depending on what the answers are there, we break it down and we go, hey, the three or the four C's. So I work on culture. Culture is the main thing that I talk about. That's the main thing. We're strategizing culture all the time.

When we do this, we make this decision. How does an associate interpret that? Did we just say that safety isn't as important as sales? Did we just say that we're going to let some things slide? Because that erodes your credibility. So we're always talking culture, we're always talking claims reduction, which is pure nuts and bolts safety. So that's maybe in the audit area a little bit. Maybe that's equipment, building equipment, sourcing equipment that's changing process and procedures. Compliance is in there. I never talk about compliance except for what I'm in front of my peers because associates don't want to hear about that. And then the last thing, the last C is credibility. So when I do all these crazy things or when I ask for money and I go, "Hey, this is this new water bottle. We got to buy it. I need $50 million" and everybody laughs.

And I go, "No, no, no, I'm serious. I need $50 million." And I'm going for the same 50 million that somebody is going for that is a sales facing thing. I have to have some pretty compelling ROI. Now, again, like I told you, our ELT is pretty cool going, okay, you're close and you're going to win because we know it's a people thing. You got to make sure that in that credibility realm, you track that thing. When I bought $50 million worth of water bottles, you better believe nobody in the entire company had a heat related injury or illness throughout the course of the whole last year. So I track every single thing. Those ROI metrics always lead with labor savings or how's it going to make it easier for you to do your job or how are we going to cut out labor? So I would say culture, claims, compliance, credibility, really interesting.

But figure out where you're starting from and figure out where your organization or your leadership is starting from. And that'll help you build a framework about what you're going to go after, how you're going to educate yourself, and what strings you want to start pulling because you can't hyper jump into being a plank throwing out spill cones and trying to make people stop flipping fall. It doesn't work. You'd be laughed... If I would've started my career doing this stuff, never would've happened. But I slowly built up credibility and it takes a long time because a giant company just like you, Tina. It takes forever to steer a culture. And my team is like, "Why can't we get this done?" And I'm like, "Because you're operating on a different clock." You got to operate on the giant lummocks of a behemoth company clock, which means you got to brainwash people, brainwash them again, brainwash them again because of turnover.

And then maybe in a year or two, you'll start trending in the direction that you want to go. And that's just the game, right? It's not easy. It's not an easy game. So, so much though that when we started talking all this lovey-dovey, humanitarian safety is a value stuff. And I'm not trying to devalue it, but we found a bogey in the whole thing where we had people leaders that didn't understand how to be credible and viable safety leaders. Just because I put you in charge of people doesn't mean you know how to lead people, people leader. And so we built out an acronym, build out a behavioral tool that instructs you when I become a department supervisor, it's first I stacked lumber really well. They made me the department supervisor of lumber. That's cool. You know how to stack lumber, but do you understand what it means to resolve problems for people, to give them the right tools for the job, in the right condition when they need them, where they need them?

Do you understand that training isn't a flat e-learning file? So we had to take a step back, that was probably five, seven years ago, and build out a rubric to help train leaders in how to be a credible, viable, legit safety leader. Which again, if you're not watching your tea leaves and to Tina's point, out there, beating the street and having real credible conversations with people, you'll miss it and you'll get frustrated and go, I don't understand why we're not reducing injuries, because you weren't addressing the right problem. You didn't evaluate the right way. So just again, getting excited.

Kevin McMenimen:

We've got a couple of questions I want to get to before we run out of time because I'm looking and realizing that we're having a good time here and we're coming up on the hour. So question from Matthew about offering incentives or campaigns celebrating or recognizing accident free days. Tina, I'll start with you because I'm not sure of the answer on how you guys, if you do any recognition or anything like that on that end. But Hank, I know we talked previously about the little pin that people lose their minds over. So Tina checking in with you first.

‍Tina Baumann:

Sure.

Kevin McMenimen:

Do you guys have incentives tied to your programs or anything like that?

Tina Baumann:

So we do. We have a couple of different things, and we're working on some new rewards and recognition program to go with All Safe. But we do celebrate injury-free days. We set goals and make sure that when we hit that goal, we go around and say thank you, make sure the associates know we appreciate them. They may do anything from a goody bag to growing out stakes. It just really depends on what level they've hit. But we are in the process of putting out what's called an all safe pin.

And if you're ever in Kroger or any of our stores, our associates love wearing pins on their aprons and love earning them. So we're in the process of doing some recognition with the pins to get the All Safe name out there, to make sure our associates understand what it's all about. And when we see them do a safe behavior when we're on a walk, then they can earn an All Safe pin. So we're in the really beginning process of building that rewards and recognition program to go with All Safe, but at the same time, we have to be careful. We can't incentivize safety because OSHA looks down on you when you do that. So we want to make sure that we're not incentivizing the safety program, but we are acknowledging and rewarding our associates for safe behaviors.

Kevin McMenimen:

Hank, I think you guys are doing a bit of that too, right? And it's not about money. It's about, like you said, the pins, the badges. I've had some exposure with the program at Lowe's, and I've never seen a group that is more competitive for points and avatars and badges and squishies and all kinds of stuff.

Hank Jones:

Oh, that's squishy will be the death of me, I swear. Yeah, same exactly what Tina said, you can't offer anything from an incentive standpoint that would disincentivize reporting of injuries. So we're very cognizant of that. We do have some party funds that we give you when you hit different thresholds. You go 60 days incident free, you get whatever, a couple hundred dollars, which depending on your store, ends up being 50 cents a head or something like that. But the further you go, you get to 180, we give you a prize pack, which is some branded T-shirts and tchotchkes, the stars, whatever it is. You get to 365, we make a pretty big deal out of it. Because of COVID, my wings were clipped, but I used to try to go to four or six, 365 day incident free stores a year just to celebrate with them. I mean, they get super pumped. You can't accidentally go a year in a Lowe's store incident free customer, bodily injuries, and associates.

So that's pretty cool. So we try to make a big deal out of that, get the regional folks out there, really do some recognition, give them a big banner to hang out of the rafters and really make it cool for them. The patches, yeah, people love their flair. And so early, I probably, we've been doing patches for three years, so we have one for the safety team, which is just a basic shield patch safety team member. We've got a safety moments patch which is, oh, I did something really cool in regards to safety and it prompts somebody to ask you about it. So they have to retell their story. We've got an angel award, which is somebody that's wearing their red vest and in the line of duty save somebody's life. We put it in AD's probably two and a half years ago.

So time somebody saves a lifetime of maneuver, something like that, they can put in an award for their peer who saved a life and they get a really nice plaque and makes them feel really special. But they get this coveted angel award badge, which looks totally different than every other badge on the planet. And again, we're prompting an executive to when they're walking the store to be like, "Kevin, dude, you got the angel badge. What did you do?" And I mean, these stories make you cry. I'm an emotional basket case. How can you not be in safety? But man, they tell you the stories about how they saved a life. And you see, I was in a store last fall and I got to meet a kid who was a recovering addict, and he was a pro loader, just hard work out in the sun every day.

And he saw somebody who OD'd in his car in the parking lot and he intervened and I'm getting choked up, and he saved this dude's life. And to be able to go to that store and present this guy with a plaque and we throw a couple extra bones in their paycheck because they did something really cool, and we give them this badge. It's one of those things that makes you feel like you just get so pumped up. You're like, oh my gosh, that's that investment that our company made in AD's or whatever that helped us just save somebody's grandpa or whatever. So there's that one. And then we have a couple other silly badges. I always walk around with a pocket full of badges that I made with my button maker at home. I'm just kidding. But I got a couple of badges.

My wife ordered me like 500 badges. They're just really cheesy. And one of them says, "I mustache you to work safely" and it has a mustache on it. And another one that has a taco on it. And it says, "Let's talk about safety." And you would think I was raining gold down on people when I'm talking to a kid at a store and I go, "Oh here, your mustache is just so crazy." And give them these little, oh my God, will you sign that? I'm like, "Yeah, sure." But again, it's just shtick and flair. It's all part of the marketing.

Kevin McMenimen:

It all comes back to that message that Tina, I think you started with here, which was you got to let them know that we care about what's important to them and that we care about them and making sure that they know it in even the littlest of ways. So that's awesome. Very quick question here on stats. I know we can't give out numbers and stuff, but impact of the program. Are we seeing the program demonstrating that there are impact on statistics?

Hank Jones:

Yeah.

Kevin McMenimen:

That was one of the questions in the chat as well.

Tina Baumann:

Absolutely.

Kevin McMenimen:

Yeah.

Hank Jones:

Yeah. So in the three years that we've been running the front facing video stuff and really pushing the line and being a lot more fun and irreverent, we've reduced our total workers' comp claim population by 25%, which is not even, it's not a thing. we've had, again, some of the people that are on the call have helped build a program and we've had constant reductions, but the reductions in the last three years have been such that our actuarials also have come to us and been like, please explain. It doesn't make sense. And they're a pretty straight laced group and you start showing them some of the silly stuff and they're like, that does not compute. And it takes a while to really get it to them, but they [inaudible 01:01:10].

Kevin McMenimen:

Excellent. And Tina, obviously you revolved your program now and you're just launching the new program. You know that there's been an impact based on the success you've had over the last X number of years, right?

Tina Baumann:

Yeah. So I'm looking at our periods this year compared to just last year and just looking at those two compared in the first three months that we have launched All Safe, we're at an 18% reduction between workers' comp and general liability incidents. So just doing, it's just remarkable change when you just get to the personal side

Kevin McMenimen:

Fantastic. Excellent. Well, I think we're out of time for today. I wish we could keep going a little bit more because there was some stuff where we were hoping to get around talking about the culture and so forth, but maybe we'll get to that separately and maybe Jacque can put out an article and we can talk to you guys a little bit more about this.

But in the meantime, let me wrap up a couple things again by starting with a big huge thank you to our sponsors NetWatch, HiveWatch and LiveView. Again, please support these wonderful organizations that support us and help us bring education to the industry. Also, a big thank you to the Loss Prevention Foundation. Remember, you qualify for three CEU credits for today's session. Don't forget to subscribe today if you haven't already. It's free. Today, it's free, and tomorrow it's free and the next day it's free. It's always free. But subscribe, get that magazine sent to your house, and if you used to get it and you don't remember getting it recently, subscribe again just to make sure you're still getting it.

Jacque Brittain:

And Kevin, if they subscribe before May 1st, they'll also get the ORC special edition with their spring copy.

Kevin McMenimen:

What a great point. There we go. Great point. Get the ORC special edition will come out with the spring edition. That's right. So subscribe today is even more important. Download the LP portal on the Google Play and Apple Store, and don't forget to tune in next week to hear who won LP leader of the year, team of the year, investigation of the year, and so forth. If you have any additional questions or comments or feedback, please feel free to send Jacque or I a note, and we will, especially if you have some questions, we'll try to get answers for you. All right. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much Hank and Tina, you guys were fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you.

Hank Jones:

Thank you all. We'll see you at Relo.

Kevin McMenimen:

Absolutely. See you soon guys. Thank you again, everybody. I mean, what else can I say but stay safe, right?

Jacque Brittain:

There you go.

Kevin McMenimen:

All right. Take care everybody. Thank you.

Tina Baumann:

Bye. Thanks.

Jacque Brittain:

Thank you. Bye.