Safety Management

Our Approach

Proper safety culture fosters personal accountability, leading to increased safety, active employee engagement, and a strong commitment to our company. This provides employees confidence that they will return home each day in the same condition as when they arrived at work.

Dedication to Health & Safety is one of our core values. Ours is a culture where every employee is personally accountable for exceeding safety guidelines in every task. We empower and reward employees for stopping work, reporting near misses, and identifying improvements that impact their own safety and that of others. Every employee has Stop-Work authority supporting our constant goal to identify and correct safety issues before they turn into incidents. Ultimately, our focused approach to safety supports reducing our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) year over year.

Our Safety Management System—Safety First!

WillScot Mobile Mini has a company-wide focus on safety implementing numerous measures as part of our Safety Management System (SMS).

Customers increasingly focus on safety records in their sourcing decisions due to increased requirements to report all incidents that occur at their sites and the associated costs. Employees want to work at a company that prioritizes safety. Our employees are proud that WillScot Mobile Mini is a safe place to work.

Our safety management system, which we call Safety First!, is administered by a Corporate Team reporting to the SVP of Logistics and Operation Excellence. This team is responsible for developing, maintaining, and administering the safety management system, assisting operations teams, providing training to ensure local teams are aware of and using safe practices, and auditing and monitoring safety performance.

How We Build Our Safety Culture

A visual diagram of WillScot Mobile Mini's Safety Management System, Safety First.

Plan

Our SMS begins with the Health & Safety Culture Policy statement, highlighting the tenets of our commitment to a safe culture. This document was drafted with the participation of the Senior Executive Team. Senior members of our team actively support WillScot Mobile Mini safety initiatives by providing time, requiring accountability, and actively committing to safety culture from the top of our organization. They review lessons-learned reports and key performance indicators (KPIs), both leading and lagging. General administrative meetings start with a review of pertinent safety protocols and KPIs highlighting areas of added focus.  

We are subject to certain environmental, health, and safety laws and regulations in countries, states, provinces, and localities in which we operate. Our health and safety programs are designed around global standards with appropriate variations addressing the multiple jurisdictions, regulations, hazards, and unique working environments where we operate. We take responsibility for our own well-being and for those around us.

Our SMS is based on both legal requirements and hazards that our employees face daily. Hazard assessments are regularly conducted to reveal issues and trends and determine root causes.

Do

Based on the hazard assessments, WillScot Mobile Mini evaluates each task, creating or modifying standard operating procedures (SOPs) and work instructions. The team provides safety training ensuring all employees understand the common hazards associated with their job tasks and know the steps each employee must take in completing them. WillScot Mobile Mini has identified our top 13 focus categories, ranging from power hand tools to fall hazards to electrical awareness/Lockout & Tagout. These 13 categories were chosen for the current period based on our regularly conducted hazard assessments.

WillScot Mobile Mini provides safety and health training that exceeds regulatory requirements in line with employees’ tasks and the hazards they face during the completion of daily tasks. Topics include Stop Work Authority, hazard awareness, power tool safety, DOT driver courses and more.

Our communication efforts focus on engaging and ensuring full conformance to each safety topic. For example, our "What's Wrong with this Picture" safety communication focuses on actual company findings and opportunities for improvement. Additional topics are pulled from our Safety Save program data. We hold weekly safety team meetings and monthly safety theme meetings. Rather than simply sharing data in a classroom, our meetings have a “go and do” focus in which we go into the field to correct any items found in a targeted inspection. An example of a monthly safety theme is "slips, trips, and hazards," bringing awareness to this topic and highlighting behaviors like proper foot placement, three points of contact, slowing down, and eyes on path.

Check

Our corporate safety team conducts regular audits, striving to visit each branch yearly. These audits review a set of consistent SOPs, work practices and KPIs. Senior managers are involved in audit reviews. Where deficiencies or corrective actions are needed, action plans are prepared, executed, and tracked to closure. WillScot Mobile Mini tracks a wide range of leading and lagging safety indicators. We focus on leading indicators as a better and more reliable gauge of organizational health than lagging indicators. This allows us to stay ahead of incident management behaviors, conditions or issues that can be corrected before an incident occurs.

We use Safety Scorecards to track the safety performance of our drivers, branches, and divisions. Our scorecards include safety-leading indicators, allowing us to spot trends and preventing them from becoming problems. These leading indicators are reported and discussed no less than monthly in each region.

Act

Regional Safety Committee calls are conducted weekly, with a representative from each branch in attendance. Safety KPIs as well as action items are discussed in detail. Attendees are responsible for taking any lessons learned to their local teams. All participants are expected to communicate the theme of the meeting to their local branch team members and self-audit, confirming everyone is in compliance with these practices.

We have partnered with our insurers for several years to conduct external audits of our safety management system and practices. Seasoned safety auditors from the insurer visit and assess our operational safety practices to look for injury potential based on latest trends at select branch locations. This program leverages external expertise maintaining our best-in-class safety management system.

Results from the Regional Safety Committee calls, the internal and external audits, and Safety Save reports are used in continuously updating our SMS. We know the critical importance of safety performance and avoiding injuries. We continue to focus on the root cause of our incidents, changing our approach as needed to target trending safety metrics.

Focused on Safety Innovation

 

A picture of the Mobile Mini Safety Save app.

Safety Save App

Our innovative and unique Safety Save application, developed in-house, provides the ability for any employee to download the app and report a safety concern. The reported incidents are sent to the appropriate manager who must then follow up with the reporter, verify that action was taken, and close out the incident. There are 12 categories of incidents and numerous subcategories that can be selected. Experienced safety professionals design and partner with the operating teams to use Safety Save reports to identify near misses, reported injuries, or plan safety focus areas based on reported or observed behaviors or findings.

A WillScot Mobile Mini truck driver about to get into his branded truck.

DriveCam

We invest millions of dollars each year in safety training, equipment, and process improvements. One highlight is DriveCam, an onboard driver behavior monitoring system. If risky driving behavior is ever detected, leaders are informed so they can coach drivers and gain commitment for improvement. This and other innovative initiatives have led to our industry-leading Department of Transportation safety scores, significant citation reductions and lower insurance rates.

Learn More About Our ESG Efforts

Inclusion & Diversity

See What Makes Us Strong

Learning & Development

Explore our growth culture

Community

See our impact