Railway Association of Canada honours Cando with award for TrackSmart safety culture initiative

The Railway Association of Canada (RAC) recently honoured Cando with a 2018 Safety Award for the company’s Employee Safety Education Program. Cando was one of two recognized in the Non-Class 1 – Employee/Third-party incident category.

The Employee Safety Education Program is an eight-hour safety training session developed internally by Cando’s Corporate Safety Department and is given to all Cando employees, including senior managers. The program emphasizes safety culture and includes modules about Safety Management Systems, hazard identification and more.

The goal of the program is to ensure all employees are taught safety principles and tactics that used to be reserved for managers only. Armed with this knowledge helps every staff member in every location understand the important role they play in building a strong safety culture.

“We are very pleased to be recognized by RAC for our dedication to safety as a rail service provider,” says Steve Gallagher, Cando’s Director of Corporate Safety.

“Our program was unique because of its tie-in to safety culture. Where most other traditional railway programs focused on specific safety training or procedures, ours was designed to help employees understand communication processes, safe work procedures and other safety initiatives and what they can do personally to improve safety performance.”

To date, over 450 employees, representing 90 per cent of Cando’s workforce, have attended the training.

The positive feedback received from employees, managers and supervisors was beyond what the company expected, and has contributed to new internal safety culture initiatives. Other railways have also approached Cando and asked to adapt the Employee Safety Education Program for their use.

“Everything we do ties back to living out our core values and being TrackSmart,” says Gallagher, referring to Cando’s company safety culture.

Read RAC’s news release here.

For media requests, please contact Julie Pomehichuk at Julie.Pomehichuk@candorail.com.

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