SLC 2020 Q&A: Amazon Uses Safety Tech to Solve Challenges and Drive Improvement

EHS Today: Can you offer us a short description of your presentation and describe how it relates to safety leadership?

MacDougall: As Amazon’s vice president of workplace health and safety, my responsibilities include establishing and putting into place protocols across our global operations network that ensure our nearly million-strong workforce remains safe and healthy.

Amazon has been one of the world’s leading private-sector responders during this pandemic. In just the first half of this year, we have invested more than $800 million in safety measures, which includes temperature checks, face masks for all of our employees, gloves, extended pay and benefits, and virus testing. We have also implemented proactive measures at our facilities to further protect employees, including increased cleaning at all of our facilities, maintaining social distance in our fulfillment centers, and, when making home deliveries, establishing distance protocols between drivers and customers.

The actions we continue to take to create a safe working environment for our workforce will likely resonate with, and provide best practices to, SLC attendees.

Why is the topic of your presentation of interest to you and why is it important to SLC attendees?

This presentation explores the common misconceptions and mistakes made by safety professionals in their efforts to lead beyond compliance and develop best practices in construction safety. Professional leaders must be aware of the difficulties of interactions and communication.

What are the takeaways you hope to leave with attendees?

We’d like to explain our approach to addressing safety concerns arising from the pandemic, our thought process as we evaluate and act upon new information from health organizations, the ways we go about solving big problems, and the new processes and protocols we believe will remain in place for the long term, which other business and safety experts may benefit from.

Please share an example of a personal or professional experience you’ve had related to safety leadership or the topic of your presentation.

How do you create work environments and adapt changing workflows to keep people safe during an unprecedented pandemic? These are just a few of the critical safety-related questions for which my team had to quickly develop answers.

For the first months of this pandemic, my senior leadership team, along with the most senior leaders at Amazon, met every single day to continually create and iterate on ways to make our workplaces as safe as possible. This process often included in-depth coordination with top local, national, and global health experts along with senior leaders from peer companies who, like us, were confronting a health emergency for which no playbook existed.

What do you think are some of the most pressing EHS and risk management issues facing corporate leaders and safety professionals in 2020 and beyond?

Every business and community, especially in North America, will have to continually adapt their strategies and tactics to ensure their people do not contract the coronavirus. It’s difficult to move beyond this subject at the moment and all that it encompasses.

Of course, technology has a role to play in keeping people safe, and companies need to embrace innovative efforts that help ensure their employees stay healthy.

It’s also critical to remember we’re dealing with a very human situation where people who come to work, their loved ones at home, and their communities are all potentially impacted by health and safety decisions employers make. Ensuring every worker comes to work healthy, and returns home healthy, will rightly become every business’s top priority.

Editor’s Note: For more information on the 2020 Safety Leadership Conference, including registration, click here.