Paula Ashley of Environmental Energy Technologies (EETD) was pleasantly surprised when she opened her December paystub. There was an unusual line item: a “Safety Award” for $50. The same thing happened to Sandra Ritterbusch in Nuclear Science.
It turns out both were card-carrying Heroes…and lottery winners.
Last summer, when EETD Grid Integration Group leader Sila Kiliccote was moving in to an office near hers, Paula noticed electrical cords were running on the floor through the middle of Sila’s new room. Paula casually remarked that this was a safety concern, and rearranged cords against a wall herself. For this moment of common-sense and decision-making, Sila handed Paula a small blue card, about the size of a driver’s license. It says “A Super Thank You!” on the front. It was one of Berkeley Lab’s Hero Cards.
Sandra earned her card for pointing out an unfortunately common practice: employees were taking a shortcut outside the crosswalk connecting Building 50 to the bus stop at Building 65. Sandra had done it herself, and the last time she did, she turned an ankle on some uneven pavement. NSD Safety Coordinator Martha White commended her for her forthrightness and handed her a Hero Card for identifying the problem. Not long after that, the Lab installed a railing to guide pedestrians toward the crosswalk. “I guess you can call it the Ritterbusch Railing,” says Sandra.
There are 225 Hero Cards waiting in the wallets of participating Lab employees, and they are ready to hand one over to you on the spot. On the back of each card, recipients are asked to register its assigned number on the Hero Card Web site, hero.lbl.gov. After Paula and Sandra did so, they were each mailed one of the Lab’s “Safety is Elemental” lapel pins. Their registration also automatically enrolled them in a drawing for the two $50 prizes.
The Hero Card program was launched last summer as an initiative of the Safety Culture Work Group, a Labwide program sponsored by Deputy Laboratory Director Horst Simon and the EHS Division to build and advance safety culture among employees at home and in the workplace. They are the group that organized the creative effort that produced the Safety is Elemental theme. They also provide those gold lapel pins. More than 960 have been distributed so far.
Work Group Chair Mike Ruggieri has been monitoring the Hero Card program. “We wanted to wait to announce this to the lab community until we saw if the Hero Card program had legs, and we learned that it does,” he says. The program started with 250 cards, each with a unique tracking number. Thus far, 225 cards have been distributed to volunteers who requested them. A recent survey found that 89 of those cards were subsequently handed-out, or “awarded,” to other employees for their good deeds.
Here’s where the program gets interesting: Once someone has been awarded a hero card, they are asked to “pay it forward.” That means handing it over to someone else, to award them for good practice or safety awareness. That new recipient then has an opportunity to pay it forward as well. Of the 89 cards, 23 have been awarded again a single time; two have been paid forward twice; and two cards have been paid forward three times. That’s a total of 122 exchanges, or 122 good deeds recognized.
