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Senior Manager, Risk Management

Steve Wilder
Vice President, Risk Management

The Walt Disney Co.

Surprise Audits Lead to Safety


The Walt Disney Co.'s Steve Wilder and Karen Kridel-Schwabe are all EARS on safety.

When it comes to safety at its retail stores, The Walt Disney Company brings an intensity that other companies may find difficult to match. For its chain of Disney Stores (which sell toys, clothes and other Disney merchandise) the company set up surprise visits to audit safety. Perhaps in homage to Mickey Mouse, the program has been nicknamed EARS, meaning Each Audit Reinforces Safety.

Representatives from Liberty Mutual (Disney Store's insurance carrier) visit stores and conduct surprise safety audits. A store manager is asked "yes-or-no" questions, as well as open-ended questions. The auditor uses a tablet loaded with a program created by third-party vendor CS STARS which uploads answers -- as well as photos and video -- to Disney executives in real time.

Are the fire extinguishers charged and up to date? Are sprinkler heads the correct distance from products? Does the store have an emergency-preparedness kit that is fully stocked? Are staff members lifting boxes of merchandise in the correct manner to reduce the risk of injury?

Steve Wilder, vice president of risk management and Karen Kridel-Schwabe, senior manager of risk management for Disney say that each store has its own unique challenges. They may have been built at different times, have different layouts, and have different storage locations for safety equipment like fire extinguishers etc.

Complicating matters was that the Disney Store chain was acquired by The Children's Place in 2004. The Children's Place ran the stores under a license agreement until Disney bought the majority of them back in 2008. That meant that some stores had different standards with different designs.

"They opened stores in that time period" said Wilder. "They were continuing to build stores that were not necessarily our design."

"It was important to us that The Children's Place ran stores in safe way," he continued. "We're not suggesting that we had this huge problem and they weren't safe," but Disney did need to coordinate the safety standards across the platform when it bought the stores back.

The audit program allowed Disney to weight certain questions more heavily than others, in accordance with its safety standards. So if certain important questions were answered in a noncompliant manner it could still possibly result in a failing total score.

Now in its second year, the program performs more than 200 safety audits annually and continues refining its questions year after year.

"We've taken it up a notch," said Kridel-Schwabe. "As we continue learning what to look for, we strive to use the tool to raise the bar."

And the results show that the program is working well.

Scores can range from 0 to 100 percent, and there has been a 14 percent increase in store safety scores from 2011 to 2012. Disney also had an 18 percent decrease in overall claims over the same time period.

"The EARS tool very quickly allowed us to educate the locations as to what is important and take a good hard look against those key metrics," said Kridel-Schwabe. "Did they need education or shift in mentality?"

A few stores even earned 100 percent on their safety audits, resulting in congratulatory calls from the president of the Disney Store chain. Those stores that didn't do as well were given a checklist of recommendations on how to improve.

The data gathered in the process allows Disney executives to identify safety trends across the Disney Store chain and make wide-scale changes to operations and maintenance if needed, said Kridel-Schwabe.

The safety assessment program is working out so well that the Walt Disney Company is considering rolling it out to other properties it owns such as ESPN; Disney owns 80 percent of that company.

"We're really lucky as risk managers to work for a company where safety is key," said Wilder. "It makes our job so much easier and more fun."

Mark Shepherd, account executive at CS STARS, said that it makes sense for a company as well-known as Disney to take such a hard-nosed stance on safety. Disney is a household name and any safety infraction could really hurt its reputation and brand.

Disney needs to make sure all of its 149,000 employees are safe on the job because of the sheer magnitude of the workers' comp claims it could be exposed to.

"For an organization like Disney," said Shepherd, "those costs can be staggering if they aren't managed properly."

-- By Jared Shelly

An Animated Focus on Safety

Steve Wilder wears a lanyard around his neck with a "Safe-D Begins With Me" tag -- the D being represented by the Disney logo. It's a visual -- yet lighthearted -- clue to his intense preoccupation with making sure all employees, or as he calls them, "cast members," and patrons of the corporations' theme parks, cruises, stores, sporting events, etc., are safe and sound.

"I like to think that everything I do is kind of focused on that in some way," he said. "I do think a lot of it is working at Disney and the culture here."

He noted that Walt Disney had four pillars: safety, courtesy, efficiency and the show. "I think Disney is a very conducive place to work for people that feel very strongly about being a leader in risk management and being safe ... ."

The surprise safety audits at Disney Stores that were initiated under his leadership are going to be rolled out to other Disney operations, including up to 3,000 sporting events around the world broadcast by its subsidiary ESPN, even though those venues are not directly owned or controlled by Disney.

Wilder was chosen as a Responsibility Leader® because the way he thinks, lives and breathes safety all day long wears off on everyone around him.

--By Anne Freedman