Every night before a StartKleen manager steps onto the plant floor, they do something small: they make sure the cards are in their back pocket.

Two plastic cards. One yellow, one red. Four questions on each. They’ve been there so long the routine is muscle memory. StartKleen is a commercial food safety and sanitation company operating across the United States, and those cards are how the company’s safety program shows up in real time, every shift, at every plant.

It Started With a Sports Analogy Nobody Had to Explain

Three years ago, StartKleen’s safety program had a near-miss reporting problem. Near-miss reports were low across our plants, and the gap between what was happening on the floor and what was being documented was wide. In facilities where crews often carpool together and family members work side by side, reporting an unsafe behavior you’ve witnessed is a more complicated act than it sounds. Those dynamics are real, and they show up in the data.

The breakthrough came from a question: what language does everybody already speak?

The Dallas Stars were in the hockey playoffs, and I started thinking about the penalty box. Hockey players get sent off the ice for rule infractions. The team plays short-handed. Everyone understands what it means. It’s consistent and nobody needs it explained to them.

From hockey, the conversation shifted to soccer. Red cards. Yellow cards. A universal language for “you’ve crossed a line” with graduated consequences. A yellow card is a warning. A red card is more serious. And even in soccer, a red card doesn’t end the player’s career. It ends the game.

The imagery clicked because of who works for StartKleen. Across our plants, we have employees from all over the world, and in many of those cultures, soccer is a shared reference that cuts across language barriers. When we introduced the concept, people understood it immediately.

Coaching, Not Punishing

The Red Card/Yellow Card program is a coaching tool. It has never been a discipline tool.

In nearly three years of running this program across thousands of employees, StartKleen has had two terminations related to safety behavior (StartKleen internal program data, 2023–2026). Both were cases where an employee wouldn’t change behaviors that put their own safety at genuine risk.

The program is designed to catch people in the moment and help them do it right going forward.

The Harder Work: Getting People to Report

Resistance showed up early. The concerns were specific: “I don’t want to write-up my friend.” “He’s my ride home.” In facilities where crews carpool and family members share a plant, pulling a card on someone felt like a betrayal. These weren’t excuses. They were real concerns from people protecting people they cared about.

Getting past that resistance required leading with vulnerability rather than policy. When StartKleen introduced the program to its management teams, senior managers stood in front of their teams and told their own near-miss stories. Things they’d done that were unsafe. Moments they weren’t proud of. The message was direct: these conversations are normal. They happen to everyone. You are not going to lose your job for having them.

The reporting culture shifted. Near misses became a standard part of daily conversation, woven into onboarding, weekly meetings and daily operations. Today it would be hard to find a StartKleen employee who doesn’t know what a red card or yellow card is.

What the Cards Signal to Your Workforce

A manager carrying those cards in their pocket every night sends a signal that most safety programs don’t: this is part of the job, every shift, not just when something goes wrong. The cards are physical proof that accountability is always on.

When employees see their manager pull a card and the result is a two-minute conversation rather than a formal write-up, the signal is equally clear. This is a workplace where you can surface a safety issue without losing your job over it. In a workforce as diverse and mobile as StartKleen’s, with employees from many countries and backgrounds, that predictability matters. People need to trust that the system works the same way for everyone.

The physical card also helps managers. It gives them a structured framework to approach a difficult conversation without improvising. Four questions on a piece of plastic, and the conversation has a direction from the first word.

The Relationship Is the Program

The mechanics of the card system matter less than the relationships they’re built on. StartKleen managers are encouraged to know their employees personally: their hobbies, their families, their goals. That knowledge shapes how safety conversations land.

When a manager knows what an employee cares about most, they can connect safety directly to that person’s life. Reagan Williams, StartKleen’s Safety Director, describes the approach this way: if a manager knows an employee has a grandchild on the way and spots them working without goggles, the conversation isn’t abstract. It’s personal.

That’s not manipulation. That’s a manager saying: I know who you are outside of this plant, and that’s exactly why I’m stopping you right now.

What This Means If You’re Considering a Career with StartKleen

How a company handles safety tells you a lot about how they handle everything else.

A company that treats safety as a punitive system, where a near miss leads to a write-up that leads to HR that leads to fear, is a company where people stop talking. Where problems go underground. Where the culture of silence builds until something serious happens.

A company that treats safety as a coaching program, where a manager pulls a card to make sure you go home the same way you came in, values the people doing the work. At StartKleen, the cards in the pocket are a signal: we’re paying attention. Not to catch mistakes, but to make sure you’re safe.

That’s the commitment those two plastic cards represent, every night, at every plant.