Cheryl McClellan
Corporate Director of EHS
Merck KGaA
Be the Engine, not the Caboose, on the Train to World-Class Safety Culture
The journey towards building a world-class safety culture hinges on proactive engagement and a commitment to continuous improvement, driven by an emphasis on leading indicators over lagging metrics. While lagging metrics, such as incident reports and injury rates, offer valuable insights into past performance, they often fall short in motivating meaningful change or preventing future incidents. Leading indicators, by contrast, focus on proactive safety measures, including safety walkabouts, hazard identification, and near-miss reporting, which are crucial for addressing risks before they materialize into serious issues.
Prioritizing leading indicators allows organizations to cultivate a dynamic safety culture that encourages active employee involvement in safety initiatives. This shift not only empowers teams to identify and mitigate risks early but also fosters a climate of shared responsibility and accountability throughout the organization.
In this session, Cheryl will share her experience of driving this mindset shift in supply chain operations of a major global Life Sciences company. Changing entrenched behaviors is challenging, and success may not be guaranteed without ongoing adjustments along the way. Cheryl will provide valuable lessons learned from this journey, highlighting what strategies proved effective and which ones fell short, as her team worked toward the ultimate goal: zero-injury workplace with full employee engagement and a world-class safety culture.
Cheryl McClellan brings almost 30 years of industrial experience in the field of Environment, Health and Safety and currently serves as a Corporate Director of EHS with Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany. With a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tulsa, she began her career as an environmental engineer at Sigma-Aldrich Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri.
Over the years, her responsibilities at Sigma-Aldrich expanded to include health and safety, and in 2006, Cheryl stepped into a leadership role as Director of EHS & Security for the Sigma-Aldrich hub in St. Louis. The diversity of operations provided a great opportunity to manage EHS aspects across an incredible spectrum of risks, to include large-scale manufacturing with flammable solvents, biological hazards with human-source materials, laboratory use of various radioactive isotopes, manufacturing of acutely toxic chemicals and high-potency active pharmaceutical ingredients, just to name a few.
Within scope of Security, under Cheryl’s leadership the St. Louis hub was the first in the company to formally incorporate Active Shooter Preparedness into emergency readiness and helped to set the standard for other global locations to follow.
Following acquisition by Merck KGaA in 2016, Cheryl continued to serve in the role as Director of EHS & Security for St. Louis until 2020, when she moved into the corporate EHS organization at Merck KGaA, primarily supporting the Life Science business across 80+ sites globally with 28,000 employees. In 2020, she was honored to receive recognition via the St. Louis Business Journal as one of the “Most Influential Women in Business.”
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she had to pivot from standard responsibilities and support US locations in COVID-19 preparedness and response and serve as an advisor to the Corporate Crisis Management Team. Post-pandemic, with the backbone of a behavior-based safety strategy and a zero-hurt mindset, she is now facilitating a cultural change in Life Science operations via implementation of multiple initiatives and programs to drive sites to a best-in-class safety culture.
She continues to be based in St. Louis, Missouri, and enjoys spending time with her family, experiencing the great outdoors, and staying active with her 3 large dogs. She is passionate about the ever-challenging safety strategy to focus on “leading activities” rather than lagging metrics and is excited to share her story!