Customer Profile: CorrChoice, LLC

CorrChoice, LLC is a major manufacturer of corrugated sheets. Their products and services include flutes, paper grades, coatings, adhesives, and testing services. A subsidiary of Greif, Inc., they operate six plants across the Midwest and Southern US.

The Challenge – Strengthen Company Safety Culture

At CorrChoice, as with most manufacturing facilities, safety is a priority. With “zero incidents” as their goal, the company’s progressive safety leadership devised a program that would reward employees for safe work practices. Aligned with OSHA regulations, the program linked safety compliance training with monthly and quarterly bonuses.

“OSHA doesn’t want you giving safety benefits just for not having injuries because it promotes hiding injuries,” says Ryan Storch, Operations Manager at CorrChoice. “So we drafted a policy that said, ‘Employees have to conduct X, Y, Z’ in order to receive that monthly and quarterly safety bonus. We just needed a way to track that information.”

But the goal wasn’t just to reduce safety incidents.

“We wanted to build a stronger safety culture,” says Storch. “Instead of just saying we want to lower safety incidents, we said, well, we’re going to lower incidents by improving our culture and increasing the responsibility of the employee.”

The Solution – Convergence LMS and Safety Training Content

To help shift the ownership for safety training to their employees, CorrChoice found they could use Convergence to deliver computer-based eLearning courses to cover their more basic training topics, and to manage training assignments and reporting within the Convergence LMS. They constructed detailed training assignments that each employee would be responsible for completing via the Convergence LMS.

“Going into a month, each employee understands what they’re supposed to accomplish and a lot of the time the supervisor clears each individual time to get it done,” says Storch. “But, if they have time to do it on their own, they are more than welcome to take care of that. That’s where the ownership comes in.

CorrChoice found that Convergence gave them the opportunity to not only deliver and track computer-based training, but to manage instructor led training as well.

“We assign eLearning courses every single month and do face-to-face quarterly,” says Storch. “But the employees also have ten meetings a month with everyone seeing each other, so that’s why Convergence is so beneficial. We’re not eating up overtime talking about stuff that is generic. Sometimes, the supervisors will just take the lead and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to rotate everybody in and out of some classroom training.’ They get that training done for the month, and then the paperwork they’re required to do is on them. Convergence gave us the perfect way to track that information.”

The Outcome – Stronger Company Safety Culture and Fewer Reportable Incidents

With the help of the Convergence LMS, CorrChoice was able to prioritize instructor-led training for the most challenging training subjects and offer self-paced eLearning courses for more routine assignments. Storch feels it has helped them meet their goal of increasing employee responsibility for safety.

“In general, it just made the entire training program much more organized and efficient, but the biggest impact has been in the transfer of ownership. What Convergence helped us develop is not just a system where you have an administrator that pushes this training to others. Here it’s the employee’s responsibility to take ownership of what needs to be done. We were able to take dull and mundane training that our employees didn’t get much out of and put it on their shoulders in the form of self-paced eLearning courses. It increased individual ownership of safety, and Convergence was what let us get there.

“Having zero incidents is still the goal, but Convergence allows us to focus our face-to-face conversations a little bit outside of the mundane annual training that everybody has to do. With Convergence we can use that hour of overtime to have impact training instead of general OSHA compliance training.”