Monogram Gourmet Food-February 2019 Meeting Recap
Posted: Mar 06, 2019
On February 25th Monogram Gourmet Foods was kind enough to host the Greater Boston and Granite State Chapter Joint Technical Meeting at their Wilmington, MA location. The topic was Interactive and Outside the Box Approaches to Safety. Justin Deflumeri, Safety Manager of the Wilmington, MA location spoke a little bit about what Monogram Gourmet Food does and provided some history on how the company came to be.
Justin then moved onto how he has been able to gain management buy in and implement creative approaches to areas of safety. Topics, which may ordinarily be tedious, are approached differently from just providing the necessary information. Training topics such as hazard recognition, PPE assessments, footwear requirements, and department audits have been turned into activities. Something as simple slip resistant shoes, which are mandatory in the facility, are turned into “Safety Checkpoints.” For this, a manager dresses up as a police officer equipped with a flashlight and inspects that all associates headed to the work area are wearing proper footwear.
The implementation of competitions that challenge the associates to be the best have also been a tool used to raise safety to the forefront of the associates’ minds. To achieve this they have implement a Safety Football League. This is done by sending out a weekly checklist to management with questions and tasks based on Safety Topics. At the end of the week the sheet is returned and points are awarded to each department based on what they were able to complete. At the end of the month the department with the most points wins the Safety Football League. This program was so successful it’s been expanded from just the Wilmington location. The Safety Football League is now a corporate wide initiative which puts the different Monogram locations across the country against each other. The winner receives the Safety Football League Champion trophy to display for the year and all the bragging rights that come with it.
The Greater Boston & Granite State Chapters would like to extend our thanks to Monogram Gourmet Foods and Justin Deflumeri for taking to time to host and share their successes and the means of achieving them.
