To reduce worker injuries, Brunswick Corp. adopted a systematic health and safety program coupled with formalized recognition of good behavior.

Successful results have followed, according to the company's injury data from operations that range from manufacturing pleasure boats to fitness equipment to billiards and bowling.

“My personal opinion is there is nothing that helps prevent accidents more than having a formalized process that addresses your hazards and controls them, said Dave Selig, director of environmental health and safety for the Lake Forest, Ill.-based company. “So we work real hard on that.”

To implement its health and safety program, Brunswick Safety Management System, the company borrows from several established management systems including ANSI/AIHA Z10-2005, the American National Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems.

The document Brunswick uses as a model for its program is approved by the Washington-based American National Standards Institute. ANSI describes it as a “voluntary consensus standard (that) provides critical management systems requirements and guidelines for improvement of occupational health and safety.”

“It's a model for a quality safety program,” Mr. Selig said. “The model basically identifies all those things we expect our facilities to be doing to drive their safety performance.”

Brunswick also maintains a point system and an audit process to rank how well facility managers and supervisors meet corporate-established safety objectives.

The audit consists of a 400-question evaluation that managers complete throughout the year. A scoring of their responses from 0 to 100 helps evaluate their performance and hold them accountable for improvements.

“People perform based on what they are measured on,” Mr. Selig said.

Questions asked include whether their plant maintains a health and safety policy that meets criteria established by Brunswick and whether they performed a job safety analysis for each function in their plant and then followed up with safety training specific for each role, Mr. Selig said.

In addition, employees working with volatile chemicals used in making boats, for instance, need specific training on properly fitting respirators and maintaining them.

Each question asked of managers is weighted.

“The questions we think drive safety performance to a higher level have a greater weighting associated with them,” Mr. Selig said of the scoring. Facilities that do everything expected earn up to 90 points.

But 10 additional points are possible if, for example, plant managers conduct inspections more frequently than on a monthly basis, as expected. Managers conducting the inspections look for hazardous conditions, such as safety guards missing from machinery.

Several years ago, Brunswick also implemented a recognition process for its facilities, Mr. Selig said. Facilities receive recognition every time they complete a year or 1 million hours of production without a lost-time incident.

In addition to that threshold recognition, plants also can win a “distinguished” award annually that includes an amount of money the plant can spend per employee, Mr. Selig said. Facilities then opt to use the money in various ways. One, for example, purchased a popcorn machine for the employee cafeteria.

Distinguished recognition re-quires meeting a recordable injury rate that does not exceed 75% of the companywide average and a lost-time injury rate that is 75% of an individual facility's previous year's rate.

Each year, a few plants deemed the best based on their performance metrics also receive a chairman's award. That includes a celebration attended by the company's chairman and workers get to vote on a favorite charity that receives a corporate donation.

Throughout the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to charities.

The efforts have helped Brunswick reduce its corporatewide recordable incident rate from 8.4 per 100 employees in 2002 to 2.81 in 2009, Mr. Selig said. Its lost-time incident rate dropped from 2.09 to 0.50 during that period.

Brunswick uses 2002 as a benchmark because it started rolling out its Safety Management Systems process in 2003.