Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™)

With Incident and Injury-Free (IIF), we created an environment over time where all workers knew they could stop work if safety was an issue. This created a culture of listening and speaking up.

In such a work environment, employees enjoy work and motivate each other to act safely. As a result of the positive safety culture, quality and productivity on the project also improved and created a strong bond between all employees.

Our cultural transformation has resulted in a safer workplace and excellent safety performance. Corporate cultural transformation was not a target, it was a journey, and it still requires the continuous involvement of each individual employee and the right mindset to reach and sustain a desired performance. 

JMJ’s Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) approach strives to instill a sense of personal responsibility in every worker on site and emphasize planning ahead and being accountable for your safety and the crew’s safety.

What you learn from the Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) safety approach are life lessons. It’s not something you’re going to do in a course and forget because it changes your own attitudes and perceptions. You’ve got a long-term change.

The scale and scope of our work on Shell Pearl GTL is unprecedented—integrating our whole team, including contractors and subcontractors, to accomplish world-class safety performance on a work site with the population of a small city.

Our commitment to Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) led to a cultural evolution at Limbach. This has resulted in terrific safety outcomes, dramatic productivity improvements, and our gross profit margin improving by 91% in five years. A win-win for our employees and our investors. 

In addition to enabling us to make safety personal, relevant and important to everyone in the company – especially with our field and craft employees – Incident and Injury-Free™ has been the one method by which we have been able to create a one-culture company. It has opened communications and assisted in building relationships that otherwise would not have been created.

Incident and Injury-Free™ doesn’t only improve safety performance, it also has a huge influence on project performance, quality control and cost management. Creating a safety culture is critical for project success and our numbers support it.

The numbers were very important, but we cared for people going home safely. Going home safely was the real target.

The emphasis on relationships worked very well. JMJ repeatedly referenced the importance of relationships, often saying a relationship could be anything you wanted it to be. This made a huge difference; the ambiance in meetings was very different to previous meetings. Subcontractors and owners spoke more freely, there were laughter and jokes. Challenges and issues were raised and we addressed them collectively.

We’ve gone from a reactive environment, (and most people would agree), getting into more independent and interdependent teams where they actually have a genuine concern for each other. On a daily basis, they’re pulling each other up too for doing non-safety conforming stuff, not because it’s unsafe, but they’re more concerned about their fellow man, their friends, their work colleagues, these people that they work with day in day out. And they’re genuinely looking after each other.

Safety became a core value and was clearly visible in the leaderships’ commitment to address and solve safety critical issues in 24 hours. In contrast to previous turnaround projects the reduction in the number of incidents was outstanding.

JMJ helped change the mindset and perspective of workers on the project. There were very systematic programs. Not only did they hold workshops that helped change our mind-set, but they followed up on workshops with group coaching. Because it was a constant process and there were regular training and coaching, it helped people be reminded of the IIF [approach] constantly.

The case for change was so compelling. We knew we couldn’t hide behind percentages. This is about saving lives.