General Motors has announced the creation of the Speak Up for Safety program to encourage and recognize employees for contributing ideas that make vehicles safer, and for speaking up when they see something that could impact customer safety. It also is intended to eradicate real and perceived organizational barriers to conversations between employees and superiors in engendering a “safety first” culture.
CEO Mary Barra instituted the program today while speaking at an employee town meeting. “GM must embrace a culture where safety and quality come first. GM employees should raise safety concerns quickly and forcefully, and be recognized for doing so.”
Barra said that reporting issues doesn’t work if there is no follow-up, so that the Global Vehicle Safety Group will be accountable to take action or close issues.
“We will recognize employees who discover and report safety issues to fix problems that could have been found earlier and identify ways to make vehicles safer,” Barra added.
More details on the Speak Up for Safety program should come within the next 30 days—read about it in GM Authority when it happens.
Comments
Meanwhile, in a recent interview in CarAdvice, GM incumbent executive vice president of product development Mark Reuss complained about the priority the company had placed on infotainment systems in the past 4-5 years, and the harm that focus had done and was doing to the brand and to vehicle performance. Reuss asserted in the interview that issues such as ride quality, safety and other priorities had been de-emphasized. In his words:
“We went through an era here where there were certain people who thought that if we just did the coolest telematics and driver infotainment thing that we would win [in the market].
“Obviously nobody is going to care about how a car drives, how the car sounds, how the car crashes … it’s all going to be about infotainment.
“All those things are important, but are they the defining things on how good a car is? Not always. That won’t always separate you, but the core fundamentals of the car will.”