Safety

Global Policy

Pitney Bowes is committed to complying with applicable Environment, Health and Safety regulations for all operations globally. We aim to:

• Provide safe products and services.
• Reduce their impact on the environment.
• Conduct our operations in an environmentally responsible manner.
• Ensure that our employees can work without injury at our facilities or other locations.

Compliance with this policy is the responsibility of every employee.

• The Global Environment Health and Safety Department is responsible for establishing policies and monitoring implementation.
• Corporate, subsidiary and business unit heads are responsible for implementing corporate EHS programs, tailored to their business needs, within their operations.

Safety

We are committed to maintaining a safe and environmentally sound workplace for our employees, contractors and guests. We do this under the guidance of our Global Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) policy and management system. Our EHS management system provides a governance process to ensure oversight and accountability for our performance, and our global EHS department supports this process with expertise in:

• Occupational safety
• Industrial hygiene
• Environmental systems
• Compliance with global regulations regarding our products and operations.

EHS Management System Highlights

Our Environment, Health and Safety Management System covers the full range of EHS issues and concerns and provides comprehensive tools for resolving them. It includes:

• Risk assessment
• Robust reporting and incident investigation
• Inspections and audits
• Management of change
• Communication
• Training.

In 2015, we upgraded our online EHS Management System training program to provide additional instruction on change management, communication, education and training and annual EHS Management assessment and planning. By year end, 950 senior managers and supervisors had successfully completed the full curriculum.

Compliance Reviews

Under our EHS Management System, we regularly conduct thorough reviews of our operations, our waste management and recycling partners and our supply base. In 2015 we completed reviews of 16 domestic and seven international Pitney Bowes locations, four waste management sites and two supply sites.

Training

In 2015, we further centralized our online learning management system, expanding the range of safety and environmental topics available to employees globally. We provide courses in person, through daily huddle or toolbox meetings and online. Our system encompasses more than 90 courses available 24/7 in 10 languages. Last year employees completed more than 3400 EHS-related courses.

Performance

In 2015, our global rate of recordable injuries rose 11%, the first increase in six years. We immediately began efforts to reverse this trend, including:

• Renewed emphasis on training of site-level ergonomic teams, with a pilot Ergonomics 101 program reaching 11 locations by the end of Q1 2016, with more to follow.
• Increased emphasis on annual Management Systems assessments and planning.
• Incorporation of EHS Management Systems into monthly Total Quality Management audits.

Occupational Fatality

Pitney Bowes suffered the loss of a Customer Care Associate who lost his life in a traffic accident while returning home from a client site.

Safety case studies:

Safer Processing of Lithium Battery “i-buttons”

Special lithium batteries with built-in memory (known as “i-buttons”) sit at the heart of thousands of Pitney Bowes postage meters. When meters come in for remanufacturing, the memory in these batteries must be destroyed before disposal to prevent unauthorized data use.  In the past, we did this by manually puncturing each unit with a punch press once any postal funds were electronically removed. But lithium requires careful handling, and new DOT lithium battery shipping regulations created an opportunity to re-examine our approach and develop safer alternatives for destruction, storage and disposal of the waste batteries.

The old approach involved storing the batteries in mineral oil to keep them segregated after puncturing, but the new regulations required physically separating the battery terminals. To do this, our team in Whitestown, IN came up with the idea of reusing the original packaging which would otherwise be discarded.  Their solution (helped by collaboration with EHS and our waste vendor) not only meets the new regulatory requirements, but is safer and more efficient at every stage—while reducing disposal costs by as much as 20%.

Safer Transport for Heavy Production Mail Components

The Pitney Bowes Vantage Flexline stacker plays a key role in high-volume production mail installations. But at 850 pounds with a high center of gravity, its size can present challenges during transport and installation—as our client service representatives (CSR’s) quickly discovered following the first few installations of the newly designed version in late 2014. The initial approach involved moving the stacker with multiple pallet jacks, setting the unit in place, lowering the support legs, then gradually removing sections of the pallet. Any missteps in this process, and the unit had the potential to lose its center of gravity and tip over.

A cross-functional team analysed available options and determined that simply adding casters to the pallet design could substantially eliminate the identified risks. This decision also eliminated the need for our CSR’s to rely on equipment located at the client site at this important time. A win all around for our people, our clients— and the stackers.  

New pallet configuration improves efficiency and safety for PB Global Client Service group, shown here at New Zealand Post.

Ergonomic Workshops

We offer half-day workshops to help employees learn how to see their work area through “ergonomic eyes.” These workshops provide a basic understanding of ergonomic principles as well as tools to help students identify ergonomic risks, assess the impact of poor ergonomic design, and take effective measures to improve the situation. Students spend time observing work assignments, then apply lessons learned to develop corrective action plans for their location by the end of the workshop.

Students from the Kent WA Site

Promoting safety inside clients’ operations

Pitney Bowes employees are often embedded within client organizations for onsite operations. In these situations, it’s important to clarify health and safety responsibilities on both sides to ensure everyone’s well-being. To this end, in 2015 our European DMT managers teamed up with Global EHS to conduct a coordinated education campaign that included visits to nearly all the affected sites throughout the region.

Interaction with clients was key to the program’s success — witness the issue of noise abatement. With most of our embedded employees located inside client production sites, noise levels from client machinery sometimes pose greater risks to our employees than client safety teams are aware of. To overcome this issue, we conducted our own site surveys, then shared the results with client managers. We also developed customised site-level EHS Handbooks to help our technicians understand where client and Pitney Bowes requirements intersect.