Eliminating workplace injuries requires educating workers and enlisting their support to help mitigate hazards and prevent accidents, said Skipper Kendrick, a consultant and former president of the American Society of Safety Engineers.

Workers suffer when things go awry and gain from training to identify safety lapses that could prevent them from returning home injury-free after a day's work, said Mr. Kendrick, president of Kendrick Global Enterprises L.L.C. in Hurst, Texas.

“Who is getting hurt out there?” Mr. Kendrick asked. “It's not the vice presidents. It's not the safety directors. It's the workers.”

Companies with robust safety programs—such as Tenaska Inc., Raytheon Co. and Brunswick Corp.—implement various ways to engage their employees.

Workers run safety committees at power plants operated by Omaha, Neb.-based Tenaska Inc., for example. They review incident reports and recommend improvements (see story, page 14). They also devise new safety drills and meet annually with peers from other company facilities to share their best practices.

Companies committed to eliminating injuries also have formalized health and safety programs and hold individual business units accountable for their safety records.

Eliminating workplace accidents requires more than just mere worker and manager “involvement” in safety programs, Mr. Kendrick said. Everyone within a company, from senior managers down to the factory workers, must be “committed,” he said.

Workers and managers may also get involved in safety meetings, but that doesn't guarantee that a worker who discovers a slippery liquid on the shop floor will clean it up immediately rather than wait until a manager addresses it, Mr. Kendrick said.

Getting commitment requires holding people accountable for safety just as they are held accountable for producing a certain number of products with a certain quality level, he said.

Waltham, Mass.-based aerospace and defense contractor Raytheon Co. holds its business units accountable by prominently posting a chart at each facility (see story, page 14). The quarterly charts rank injury rates by company business unit. Units with above-average injury rates will hear from upper management while those with exceptionally low rates receive praise.

Lake Forest, Ill.-based Brunswick Corp. systematically ranks its business unit compliance with a structured corporate safety program that it rolled out in 2003 and has continued to improve since then (see story, page 13).

A reduction in workers compensation losses are among Brunswick's success measurements. Between 2002 and 2009, Brunswick reduced its number of workers compensation claims by 73% and its incurred costs by 65%.

But injury rates and workers compensation statistics are lagging indicators of how a company is doing, said Dave Selig, Brunswick's director of environmental health and safety.

To learn how well its facilities are complying with safety objectives known to reduce those lagging indicators, Brunswick's safety program includes an extensive questionnaire about safety practices that managers complete throughout the year.

“We have to look at every job to make sure we address every hazard so it's controlled appropriately,” Mr. Selig said.