A Message from the Newest Bermex ASR Committee Chair

A Message from the Newest Bermex ASR Committee Chair

By Hannah Bell, meter services supervisor, Bermex

This is a brief introduction to myself — Hannah Lee Bell, supervisor — as the new Area Safety Representative (ASR) Committee Chair, as well as my plans to fire up this group! I’ve been greatly inspired by the passion that ACRT and Bermex Safety Manager Keith Pancake and ACRT and Bermex Assistant Safety Manager Adrienne Jones bring to safety here at Bermex and am excited to throw my fuel into that fire as well when it concerns the ASR group.

The goal is to get our ASRs more involved with each of their fellow meter readers across all projects and make themselves well-known as our champions of safety; to serve as an example to each of their projects. Uplifting the individuals elected to be our ASRs so that they may honor their title and become the mouthpiece for their project is essential; giving a voice to all the workers in their project to allow us to assess what all we can provide and do to improve our overall safety in the field.

I would like everyone in each project to know their ASRs by name and recognize them as a pillar they can lean on and learn from. There is always room for improvement when it comes to safety and the ASRs should be used to unveil that which may remain unseen from a desk. I implore all supervisors and managers to reach out to your ASRs as tools to aid in onboarding safety training, PPE distribution documentation, audits, reaching out to the team to boost near-miss report participation, weekly safety calls, and any other tasks requiring safety and leadership which you expose them to the training for! They are a valuable, exciting, and flexible asset to your team and should be provided with the chance to shine. I recently asked one of my ASRs, Stephanie White, to mirror me in doing a once-weekly group text to our team to increase our near-miss reporting and assist them in such. We’ve boosted our near-miss report numbers radically from less than three per week to, most recently, 19 in one week! The results were remarkable and cemented the validity of the use of ASRs and what the group could easily accomplish given the stage to do so. I am hoping that we evolve to have a corner of this newsletter to display our progress and allow each member to have some spotlight. The ASR group is about building a network to get everyone STOKED about safety and we plan to be well-known in our workplace this year!