A Safety Transformation: Building a Culture of Care in Manufacturing

Manufacturers spend billions of dollars every year on automation, equipment, and productivity improvements. However, none of those investments matter if employees do not return home safely at the end of the day. Rodney Rodavich, Vice President of Global Health and Safety at TE Connectivity, talks about what has worked to build a positive safety culture at his company.

"The reason we're doing this is not about the numbers. Certainly, we look at numbers, but it's to guide us in how to get to keep our plants and our overall business safer, as opposed to thinking of it as, 'hey, yeah, we get to report a great number...' It's really around the people,” Rodavich said.

The conversation highlights how TE Connectivity shifted its safety paradigm from chasing metrics to protecting human lives. Spurred by a personal family tragedy, Rodavich champions the idea that safety is a precondition, not a shifting priority. By focusing on professional transparent communication, proactive leading indicators and directly engaging floor operators, the company has successfully integrated safety with quality and productivity. Their multi-tiered training methodology — moving from the classroom to a specialized "safety dojo" and finally to the shop floor — ensures that safety mechanisms are practical, actionable and deeply embedded within the workforce.

"Safety is not... competing with things like productivity or quality or delivery. It's a fundamental enabler of that,” Rodavich said. “And what we've learned through looking at things is the safest plants are also the most productive."

Safety as a Precondition, not a Priority:

Priorities naturally compete and shift depending on production demands, urgent orders, or tight schedules. By redefining safety as a precondition, it becomes a non-negotiable enabler of operations. The safest manufacturing plants are consistently the most productive and have the highest quality.

"If you talk about safety in the priority sense... priorities change. And so that means that at some point, safety is going to potentially take a backseat to maybe an urgent order or a very hot program. And so we changed that terminology and we said safety is not a priority for us. It's a precondition,” Rodavich said.

The Power of Proactive Leading Indicators:

Rather than relying solely on lagging metrics (looking back at injuries that already occurred), TE Connectivity partnered with external support to launch a serious injury and fatality (SIF) potential identification program. Programs like "Great Catch" and "Don't Walk By" incentivize employees to identify and report hazards early, leading to the highest number of safety suggestions in the company's history.

Uncovering "Air Traps" Through Floor Engagement:

Traditional Behavioral-Based Safety (BBS) often focuses heavily on observing employee mistakes.

The Three-Tiered Training Approach (Safety Dojo):

Classroom training alone is insufficient for changing habits. TE Connectivity utilizes a robust training pipeline:

1. Classroom Education: Learning regulatory and localized fundamentals.
2. Safety Dojo: Practicing procedures (like lockout-tagout) on simulated machinery without putting anyone in harm's way.
3. On-the-Job Practice: Direct execution on the plant floor to ensure the training translates to real-world work.

"Employees know when leaders are sincere about safety and they see how they drive it across the sites...,” Rodavich said. “If a leader doesn't use a handrail while going up and down the steps, what does an employee think that he sees that? And do they think that rules are optional when they go out on the floor and have to do something more serious like a lockout-tagout procedure?"

Safety Cannot Be Siloed in EHS:

A company cannot simply "EHS its way" into an improved safety culture. While talented and courageous Environment, Health and Safety professionals are essential to outline the guardrails, the culture must be owned and actively lived by leadership.

Ultimately, TE Connectivity’s success proves that world-class safety performance requires visible, sincere leadership and two-way communication. When executives treat safety as an intrinsic prerequisite to doing business and actively collaborate with the front-line workers who know the machinery best, incident rates drop, quality rises, and most importantly, employees return home safely.