Podcast: Inside OSHA’s VPP program and what it means for industrial leaders
Key takeaways
- Achieving OSHA's VPP status requires a deep culture shift focused on continuous safety improvement and employee involvement.
- VPPPA offers mentoring and peer learning to help companies reach top-tier safety performance, with or without VPP certification.
- Complacency in safety can lead to decline; even elite sites must keep improving to avoid the “VPP slump.”
- The Safety+ Symposium provides hands-on learning, peer networking, and insights on AI, HOP, and safety leadership trends.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Dave Blanchard, editor in chief of EHS Today, speaks with Chris Williams, executive director of the VPPPA, about the evolving role of safety in manufacturing and the impact of the VPPPA’s work. The conversation explores what it takes to achieve and maintain OSHA’s VPP designation, emphasizing the importance of cultural commitment and continuous improvement. Chris shares insights on mentorship, knowledge-sharing, and the shift toward more collaborative safety models, particularly for small and mid-sized companies. They also preview the upcoming Safety+ Symposium, highlighting hands-on learning, peer engagement, and forward-looking topics like AI and Human Organizational Performance.
Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:
EHST: Chris and I are quite familiar with each other, but many of our listeners may not be that familiar with the VPPPA or their safety plus show. So we'll be talking about that a little bit. So just to get things started, Chris, why don't you tell our listeners what the acronym VPPPA stands for and what you do.
CW: Certainly, Dave. Again, thank you for having me on the podcast. VPPPA, our longest, our long name is the Volunteer Protection Programs Participants Association. Obviously that's a mouthful. So, we go by VPPPA and we're actually celebrating our 40th anniversary as an association this year. We started way back in 1985 as an association that represented sites and OSHA's volunteer protection program and our first conference was actually the year before that. And so we formed as an association a year later. So we're holding our 41st annual conference here this August in Saint Louis. The association, much like Safety Plus, our annual conference has evolved over the years.
Like I said, we originally started as an association that represented sites and OSHA's VPP program and we've evolved now to represent site stakeholders, companies that are in pursuit of a VPP level performance, meaning the very best of the best in terms of safety and health management systems, safety and health performance.
So we look at how we've come along in our history and how we've come along with this conference. We're really catering to an audience that wants to engage in continuous improvement and be the very best of the very best when it comes to sending their workers home in the same or better condition in which they arrived.
EHST: All right, so let's talk a little bit about the VPP designation that OSHA ascribes to some companies. How difficult is it for a company to get that VPP designation?
CW: Well, Dave, it is extremely difficult to get that VPP star flag and go through the program to the point where there's less than 2,000 sites and companies nationwide that are VPP certified. And to get to VPP level, it requires a very significant investment, not necessarily from a resource standpoint, but from a commitment standpoint to engage in a total culture change within your company or your site to become a company or a site that really involves from an employee side of it moves from employee engagement where we talk to our employees to employee involvement where they're partners in safety and health and where management gives employees, those frontline workers, the resources to identify the best practices and safety and to really engage in that evolution, in that continuous improvement. And then from the OSHA standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, the third leg of this, the third side of this triangle is OSHA overseeing the program and I mentioned how difficult it is to get to. Keep in mind that the average certification process approval process from submitting an application to raising that star flag with OSHA Department of Labor officials on site can go from 6 to 24 months and a lot of that's dependent on the safety culture and the safety processes that your site's got in place already.
Now maintaining VPP is just as difficult. Every site in the program, every company in the program is required to go through a recertification audit every three to five years. This is a top down tear down of your site safety and health practices to the point where an OSHA representative, the VP managers on site for three or four days at least, along with special government employees from other VPP sites, and they're looking to rip apart your site. And I mean that in a positive way because a VPP site, when we talk about that culture change, they really want that. They want you to come in and identify any potential hazards or any issues to find and fix because.
That's part of continuous improvement and there are sites that will legally withdraw from the program, what we call the VPP slump, where they get to a point where they look at it, they've gotten to where they don't feel they're up to the standard. So voluntary withdraw, voluntarily withdraw from the program in addition to having those stringent recertification audits that can result in a site being pulled from the program. So it's very difficult to attain, even more difficult to achieve. The one thing I'll add to that, Dave, is that a lot of folks, when we talk about third-party accreditations, even with VPP, there's a lot of companies, a lot of sites that view that achievement as the culmination of their safety and health journey. I mean, in reality, achieving VPP star status is [just a] point on their safety and health journey of continuous improvement. It definitely is not the end because there's always room to get better.
EHST: Yes, that's key. You mentioned that continuous improvement. I found that throughout my career, which focuses heavily on manufacturing companies, no matter what process you're talking about, whether it's safety or production or whatnot, if you feel like you've gotten to the pinnacle of success and nothing could possibly get any better. That's when things start going wrong because you get too complacent.
CW: Complacency is the correct term. We've got a presentation session we do at our conference every few years that that is actually called the VPP slump and what it's about is sites companies that are in VPP for 8 plus years that have gone through a few recertification audits.
And they come to a point where what's some of them will ask what's left to achieve. And to your point, you know whenever somebody says, you know we've got there, we're doing, we're the very best of the best. So that's great, but take a look at your lagging indicators. Are they zeros? Well, if they're not zeros, there's still things, there's still folks that are going home that that are injured. It may be a a minor other recordable, but there's still opportunities to get better and get that number down to 0. I'm an optimist. Some call me a dreamer, to quote John Lennon, but I firmly believe that zero is achievable across the board and that's what our sites, that's what our VPPPA members work towards.