Ensuring the safety of our people–whether employees or contractors–is an essential and core component of our commitment to safety. Our company has been on a journey to world-class safety for years. In 2017, we launched our latest five-year initiative that included the addition of a vice president of Safety to Tampa Electric's leadership team and several of the programs listed below.

Through these efforts, along with our team's relentless pursuit of cultivating and growing a "speak up for safety" culture across Tampa Electric, we are on the path to achieve our goal of eliminating all injuries from our workplace–with 2020 being one of our best safety-performance years ever.

Key Safety Programs

• The company empowers all team members with the authority to stop work if they feel, perceive or observe a task to be unsafe. This empowerment promotes our "speak up for safety" culture and is valued at all levels of the organization.
• Company Risk Training: A companywide risk training program for front-line team members at our operational sites, which focuses on identifying hazards and taking appropriate action.
• Pre-job Risk Briefings: We require team members to perform a pre-job risk briefing before a task or job is started to discuss the potential risks/hazards and eliminate them by ensuring effective mitigation measures are in place before starting a job.
• Near-Miss Reporting: We encourage near-miss reporting to ensure all incidents that are identified as near misses are recorded and the lessons learned are shared across our company.
• Proactive Safety Reporting: We encourage team members and contractors to speak up for safety and identify hazardous conditions. Action items are developed for each hazardous condition and tracked to completion, with a goal of mitigating the condition as quickly as possible.
• Safety Observations: We encourage team members to perform safety observations on other team members and contractors to promote a "speak up for safety" culture. These conversations are held to discuss the hazards of the task, the mitigation in place, the associated safe-work practices or safety programs, and what could be improved.
• "I Am Safety" Program: We promote a culture of safety leadership and ownership that emphasizes how each team member is responsible and accountable not only for their own safety but also the safety of others. This effort builds a culture where everyone understands the importance of doing their part every day–whether it's developing safety programs and practices, adhering to and understanding safety practices, or speaking up for safety–to create an environment where no one gets hurt.
• SafeStart Program: We promote a culture of awareness where we train our team members to recognize when certain human factors and observed behaviors may introduce additional risk to the task at hand. This program promotes our stop-work culture and is a preventative step to ensure no one gets hurt.

New Safety Initiatives

Our team is always working to increase our safety culture and minimize potential risks for our employees and contractors. As part of our ongoing effort to be continually improving, our team is developing several new safety initiatives, including a new safety incident reporting tool, adoption of a Soft-Tissue Injury Prevention Program, Public Safety Communication Initiative, a comprehensive review of how we plan high risk and critical work and more.

Contractor Safety

In addition, we have instituted a Contractor Safety Management Program that is specifically for contractors. This program provides a companywide standard for contractor management practices that provides guidance to team members who manage contracts and/or contractors to ensure safe completion of work, clear accountabilities, active engagement of contractors, and a consistent and structured approach to contractor health and safety.

When contractors are working on behalf of Tampa Electric, the program establishes safety expectations, provides information regarding potential hazards, and covers specific Tampa Electric safety requirements.