Leading employees to safety at GROWMARK's annual Health & Safety Day

What do pigs and health and safety have to do with each other?

In this case, Lester Zmolek, senior safety specialist of GROWMARK took a unique approach with an ice-breaker for more than 30 FS member co-operative employees who attended the annual GROWMARK Health and Safety Day on Dec. 4 at the Holiday Inn in Kitchener when he asked everyone to draw a picture of a pig!


Apparently, many factors of a person’s personality can be exposed by analyzing their individual pig portraits. These key personality traits may have an impact on how we conduct ourselves in regards to health and safety by our ability to respond quickly, focus attentively or whether we are more of a risk taker or approach things cautiously. These are just a few of the personality traits exposed by one's quick pig sketch.

Lester Zmolek of GROWMARK interacts with particpants
quizzing them on some Health and Safety statistics.

Zmolek says that once all safety measures are taken, then usually, the three main reasons accidents occur are that the employee is complacent and has done the task many times before, or he or she is not concentrating on the task or just simply not aware of proper actions.

MTO officer Bud Kneller

“We can follow all the health and safety regulations in the world, but if the correct state of mind and focus is absent at the scene, then a near-miss or accident is likely to occur,” says Zmolek. “You can lead a horse to water......and we must lead our employees to safety.”

Participants then broke off into groups to discuss several different incident scenarios and determine what measures they would take to avoid the same incident in the future. Next on the agenda was Ministry of Transportation Officer Bud Kneller, who covered a variety of topics such as cargo securement, and trip inspections. The group took part in a lively Q&A session and was able to pin-point specifics in regards to best practices in protecting themselves against MTO fines and transportation safety regulations.

The afternoon consisted of an update on Ontario’s health and safety legislations by Erin Aldred, GROWMARK Ontario Health & Safety specialist, and a session on life of an accident. Pete Trotter, legal council for GROWMARK and Ian Campbell, senior partner with Hicks Morley were joined by Bob Dobson, operator from FS PARTNERS Beeton location and Erin Aldred for a panel discussion on a true case accident that occurred in 2010.