Walking the Talk: Leading Safety Through Economic Pressure

Inside a Mercer Celgar Safety Day — and what “felt leadership during times of economic hardship” looks like on the mill floor.

Part of Mercer’s recognition of Global Safety Days

At Mercer, safety is not a poster on a wall. It is a day on the calendar at every operating site. To mark our annual Safety Days, senior leaders, the local management team, union representatives, and visiting safety professionals from other Mercer operations recently conducted Safety Day at Mercer Celgar, our northern bleached softwood kraft pulp mill near Castlegar, British Columbia. Mercer International is a global forest products company with operations in Germany, Canada, and the United States. The Celgar mill has been part of the Castlegar community since 1961.

The Safety Day focus this year was intentional: felt leadership during times of economic hardship — a challenge that resonates well beyond a single mill, and well beyond our industry.

Why this theme, and why now

Across heavy industry, cost pressure is a daily reality. Capital is scrutinized, projects are deferred, and teams are asked to do more with less. That is exactly the environment in which safety programs are most likely to quietly erode — not through a single decision, but through many small ones.

“We’re scrutinizing costs and controlling everything we can — but the critical elements that protect our people don’t move. Safety Day is how we go to the floor and confirm that, firsthand, with the people who are most at risk.”

— Mark Goebel, Vice President, Health & Safety, Mercer International

The discipline behind that commitment is the hierarchy of controls. In a high-risk environment like a pulp mill, hazards are attempted to be eliminated, substituted, or engineered out; when that is not practicable, administrative controls and PPE prevail— and Safety Day exists to verify that this discipline holds, that critical controls stay firmly in place, and that every decision about managing risk is deliberate and documented rather than left to drift. The failure mode the team guards against is ‘gapping’: letting a control quietly lapse over time. Confirming in person that this doesn’t happen is the entire point of the exercise.

Trust, but verify. “Walking the talk”

What makes a Safety Day more than a feel-good visit is its structure. The day follows a three-step process. Leaders spend roughly an hour reviewing the site’s safety program and documentation to establish what should be happening on the floor. They then spend the rest of the day in the workplace — in control rooms, maintenance shops, and the field — confirming that what is written down is what actually happens.

We spend time on the paperwork to understand what should be happening. But most of the day, we are out there confirming that we are walking the talk — going to the floor, observing work, and talking with the people who are most at risk.

— Mark Goebel, Vice President, Health & Safety, Mercer International

It is a “trust, but verify” approach. The program is trusted; the audit is the verification that the protocols are in place where the work is done. Crucially, that verification happens in conversation with frontline employees, using open-ended questions — not by reviewing binders in a boardroom and assuming the rest.

We look not only for compliance with programs but also for best practices to share with other operations or across Mercer, as well as opportunities to strengthen our systems.

Designing for honest conversation

Honest feedback does not happen by accident, and several deliberate design choices make it possible:

• Small groups and one-on-ones. Rather than a single large town hall where few hands go up, the team splits into small groups — and often pauses to speak with a single operator — so people have the space to speak candidly.
• Sites design their own visits. Local management plans the day around the theme and knows the questions in advance, but does not control the independent review of the document. The point is to go where the work and the risk actually are, not to stage a tour.
• A round-table lunch. Now a standard feature of every Safety Day, this open forum sets the audit aside and simply invites conversation — about the site, the company, anything on people’s minds — directly with senior leaders and guests.
• Cross-pollination. Safety professionals from other Mercer operations join each event — at Celgar, colleagues from the Mass Timber operations in Spokane and the Okanagan. They bring fresh eyes to a site they don’t know, and — for those newer to the profession — the experience is a powerful development opportunity, exposing them to how senior leaders, local teams, and unions work together.
• A built-in feedback loop. Every Safety Day closes with time for the team to answer a simple question: Was this a valuable use of your time, and what should we do differently? That habit is why the program keeps getting sharper.

The intent behind all of this is to reach the people and places a normal week tends to overlook — and that, for the leaders who took part, was a highlight of the day.

One thing I really appreciated was getting to the places leadership doesn’t normally go — the chip truck dumper, the heavy-duty mechanic garage, the chip lab. It was really good to get out and talk with people who don’t get many visitors, especially from leadership.

— Bill Adams, Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Vice President, Canadian Pulp Operations, Mercer International

What “good” looked like at Celgar

Verification is not only about finding problems. The Celgar visit surfaced practices worth recognizing — and worth borrowing. Tellingly, the site did not stage the day:

There was no special housekeeping blitz because it was Safety Day — it was just a normal day out there, and the people from outside recognized that the housekeeping across most of the mill was very good. It’s nice to have all our people openly have good, respectful discussions with everybody. For me, that’s a win. — John McKay, Managing Director, Mercer Celgar

• Professional candor about safety. Employees spoke openly and constructively about health and safety, treating it as a core business attribute rather than a source of conflict — a strong signal of psychological safety.
• A joint committee that does the work. Celgar’s joint health and safety committee (JOHSC) is highly effective, not just active. Compliance with toolbox talks and safety meetings was so consistent that the auditors could not find anyone who had missed them.
• A genuine mental-health focus. The site is training its committee in mental health first aid — a fitting priority given the theme, and one that recognizes wellbeing as inseparable from safety.
• Transparent, multi-channel communication. Through town halls, newsletters, and leaders engaging directly on the floor, information reaches people in multiple formats — and concerns get addressed before they fester.

The real value: finding the gaps

The whole point of “trust, but verify” is that it surfaces things no one would see from a desk. Several learnings from Celgar carry lessons for any safety-conscious operation:

• A control is only as strong as the workforce’s understanding of it. A procedure such as permit-to-work exists to protect both employees and contractors — but it only works if everyone understands what it is for and how to use it. Verifying comprehension on the floor matters as much as having the procedure on file.
• One system, not two. Legacy or informal channels that sit outside the official safety system create confusion and risk. The lesson is the discipline of a single, well-understood line of communication for raising concerns — with a clearly defined escalation path for when an issue is not resolved — rather than parallel systems that compete with one another.
• Re-verify your foundations. Even core concepts like felt leadership benefit from periodic refreshers. Confirming that foundational training is genuinely understood — not simply delivered once — keeps a program from drifting.

A program that keeps improving

Mercer’s Safety Days have evolved over nearly a decade. What began around 2016 as informal leadership visits — rooted in the broader “Road to Zero” safety movement — has matured into a structured, repeatable audit and one of the company’s most valued health and safety tools. The throughline across that evolution has always been the same: when senior leaders show up in person and act on what they hear, it builds trust that no memo can.

Part of what makes it stick is accountability. Each year, the team revisits the commitments made the year before and confirms whether they were carried out — then builds a list of items to follow up on before the next visit. At Celgar this year, almost every action from the previous Safety Day had been closed out.

Part of Safety Day is accountability — going back to review what you committed to last year and confirming you actually followed through.

That commitment to improvement is also evident in the way themes are chosen. Rather than one program for everyone, each business unit selects a theme aligned with its real risks — new, young, and temporary workers in expanding wood-products operations; abilities management; mental health and onboarding in office environments; and mobile equipment and pedestrian safety in pulp operations. Tailoring the theme to the site is itself a best practice: it keeps Safety Day purposeful rather than routine.

The lesson that travels

If there is a single takeaway for our industry, it is this: felt leadership is not about being present when things are easy. It is about being present when budgets are tight — walking the floor, asking open questions, listening to the people most at risk, and demonstrating in person that safety is not the thing that gets cut. That is a practice any organization can adopt, in any economic climate.

We can’t lead our organizations from the office. We’ve got to be out there, talking with our people and understanding them.

— Mark Goebel, Vice President, Health & Safety, Mercer International

Photo (l-r): Justin Labossiere – HSE Manager (MMT), Cameron Bleackley – Manufacturing Manager (MC), John McKay – Managing Director (MC), David McGaffin – Pipefitter Group Leader, Maintenance (MC), Mark Goebel- Vice President, Health and Safety (MI)