In facility soft services, safety often involves going above and beyond the call of duty to deliver the best outcomes.
Nowhere is that ethos more readily apparent than on the job sites and in the corporate meeting rooms of SBM Management Services, a national soft services firm based in Sacramento, California.
SBM Management Services caters to Fortune 500 customers in the aerospace, life sciences, automotive and aviation, and high-tech manufacturing sectors. The company is among select West Coast firms to receive Highwire’s Gold Safety Award—a testament to its ongoing commitment to safety.
What does that commitment look like from afar? Brian Anderson, Executive Vice President of Environment, Health, Safety, and Risk at SBM, says it’s all about employee engagement and empowerment, executive involvement up and down the chain of command, and stringent internal safety benchmarks that aspire beyond the minimum industry standards.
“Our safety story is pretty simple,” Anderson tells Highwire. “We care about our employees, and safety is integrated into everything we do—from our corporate departments to the line-level, and in our everyday business decisions with current and potential work.”
Anderson continued: “Our safety journey has always been one of employee engagement; of hazard recognition, elimination, and mitigation; and of going beyond basic compliance expectations to embrace best practices and drive our safety program forward.”
‘Behavior-based’ safety approach
From close range, the secret to SBM’s success is what Anderson describes as the company’s “behavior-based safety” approach. Such a program focuses on influencing employees’ actions toward greater safety.
To do that, SBM has developed a sophisticated safety management system that enables employees to report incidents or hazards through a “Good Catch” program. Employees must feel they can speak up, whether by identifying a “Good Catch,” or by making suggestions as to equipment or tool changes. Employees are also encouraged to play their part in reimagining a different company safety process without—and Anderson really stresses the importance of this—fear of retaliation if such revision is necessary.
Part of the focus on employee behavior necessitates a robust training program. A national leader in custodial and maintenance services with locations across the country, SBM’s marketing and training departments have created more than 300 EHS-specific trainings—many video-based—across 110 languages that employees can take on their smart devices. The company’s safety training is delivered through a proprietary performance technology called 4insite, which helps drive compliance and improve performance.
The importance of data and insights
Of course, safety and risk management wouldn’t be complete without the ability to collect data.
As with many top companies, Anderson says SBM tracks leading and lagging indicators. That means total recordable incident rates, lost time case rate, DART rates—even a proprietary rate called total incident rate, which captures all incidents from reportable to first-aids. It also means paying attention to corrective action closures, training compliance, audit results, and core process compliance, among other metrics.
Anderson says that among all of the software platforms the company uses, Highwire helps keep track of all that data in a user-friendly way.
In addition to receiving the Gold Safety Award, SBM was awarded America’s Safest Company awards from EHS Today in 2014 and 2021. The firm is a corporate member of the National Safety Council, the American Society of Safety Professionals, and the American Industrial Hygiene Association. It has also taken home numerous Governor’s Awards for Safety Excellence. Additionally, SBM is the only provider in soft services to achieve OSHA’s “VPP STAR” designation through a rigorous application and OSHA audit process.
Asked what the Highwire gold badge of honor means to the company, Anderson said: “It’s validation that we’re best-in-class among our peers, and it’s recognition of all the investment and focus that we put in our safety programs.”
“Safety is a core value at SBM,” Anderson concludes. “As priorities and expectations change, depending on your day-to-day business pressures, core values remain the same. We don’t compromise safety for any reason.”
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