Safety: Making notable progress on a vitally important priority

Keeping Our Colleagues Safe
In the 2009 fiscal year, ADM’s total recordable incident rate improved 20 percent over our rate for 2008, and our lost workday injury rate improved 10 percent during the same period. Overall, safety improvements since 2003 have prevented approximately 1,900 recordable injuries and 830 lost-workday injuries.



In addition, during 2009, we began the rollout of our Values-Based Safety® initiative, which encourages safe behavior in the workplace by training employees and contractors to observe their colleagues’ safety behaviors, and to provide feedback about those behaviors in a constructive way. Because this feedback model is predicated on a team-based approach to managing safety processes, and because “near misses” are investigated with the same intensity as recordable injuries, VBS stands to significantly advance ADM’s goal of Zero Incidents, Zero Injuries.



Keeping Our Communities Safe
Safety’s central role in ADM’s corporate culture is evident in some of the novel programs our colleagues have developed not just to protect their friends and co-workers, but also to promote better safety among residents of our local operating communities. In Paraguay, for instance, colleagues at an ADM oilseed processing plant have extended to several communities nationwide a motorcycle safety initiative originally developed for colleagues. Motorcycles are a popular mode of transportation in Paraguay, and accidents are exceedingly common. So working with local law-enforcement authorities, ADM employees developed an awareness program that has led to a significant increase in the use of helmets.

View a video about ADM's motorcycle safety program in Paraguay below.