We believe that our employees are our greatest assets and that keeping them safe, healthy and secure is our highest priority. We believe a safe culture starts with the top organizational leadership and extends to all who work for Agrium. Everyone must put safety first and report conditions when they identify a concern.

Agrium is committed to communicating regularly with employees, contractors, customers and neighbors at all locations. This means we are able to catch problems before they occur and plan our response to ones that are unforeseen.

We are committed to regularly evaluating and eliminating workplace hazards and providing high-quality employee training and equipment.

If an incident does occur, we are committed to finding out why it happened to prevent this from ever happening again.

We know that to keep our employees safe we need to continuously improve business systems and extend beyond meeting regulatory requirements. We are committed to the implementation of our Environment, Health, Safety and Security Management Systems at all levels of the organization. We conduct frequent and rigorous assessments at all locations to ensure conformance with our systems and to applicable regulatory requirements.

"Listening to other people's stories made me realize how easy and simple it is to lose your focus and get hurt or have a near miss."

SAFESTART is advanced safety awareness training that teaches participants how to avoid behaviors that can cause them to make mistakes and errors. Telling employees to be careful is not enough. SAFESTART takes the mystery out of being careful by helping people recognize patterns that significantly increase the risk of what they are doing.

After asking over twenty thousand people in all types of industries and situations about their personal injuries, SAFESTART found that the underlying causes of 85-95 percent of injuries can be summarized by four behaviours - rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency. Implementation of the program has consistently reduced injuries by 50-90 percent.

Employees are encouraged to promote and reinforce the SAFESTART concepts and it is now common practice at our Redwater and Fort Saskatchewan Operations to see some of the messages (i.e., eyes on task, mind on task) used on safety notices, supervisors' memos, and emails.

In February, twelve employees from these sites participated in “train the trainer” sessions. In March and April, these twelve employees helped deliver the training to their co-workers.

Below are a few comments from workers:

"This training makes you realize that you could have prevented a lot of incidents by paying closer attention to the task at hand."

"It was good to learn to recognize triggers that cause accidents and the tools to use to find out why it happened."

"I thought this was down to earth 'holistic' training, focused on concepts that apply to overall life experiences and not just work-related incidents."