Rooftop Safety is more than just following OSHA guidelines. It’s our #1 priority.
Last week our leadership team came together for our quarterly meeting to discuss our successes and challenges from the previous quarter. We mute our cell phones and close our laptops and spend time reviewing our performance and brainstorming on what we can do to keep moving forward. It is a day of ”around the box” thinking and round table style discussions that allows our managers an opportunity to bring up new ideas or get advice on potential issues or challenges. By doing this, we ensure that our entire team from the IT department to our Service department are all reaching for the same goals – not to mention it is a great way to build up our team and encourage collaboration from every department.
At last week’s meeting we had several exciting conversations about our 2016 goals. Many of the topics we discussed included trends the entire industry is experiencing including finding and retaining skilled labor, developing quicker response times and better communication methods and even alternative revenue sources. While all of these were fantastic conversations and we came up with some incredible initiatives, there was one topic that particularly hit home for me – job site safety.
By far, we are one of the safest roofing contractors in the industry with a consistent EMR of less than 1.0 (the industry average). We develop safety plans for every project we undertake and have a dedicated safety department that does both routine and random inspections on every job. We train every roofer to OSHA standards and are constantly monitoring revisions and updates to OSHA regulations for new and improved methods for keeping our crews safe. Our company culture believes that safety initiatives are not just important. They are about life or death. We would rather pull a person off of a job for not following safety regulations and retrain them than continue with lives at risk. It’s just that simple. We have a zero tolerance policy for fall protection violations with an underlying foundation of training and improving overall Safety. Our customers demand it and our employees deserve it.
So with that discussion, we will continue to look for additional ways to get buy-in among all employees for ultimate Safety company-wide, both on job sites and at our Metal Fabrication Facility and in our headquarters in general. Some of the innovative concepts that can be applied are drones and job site webcams, as well as peer-on-peer ownership and additional training resources. We will continue to make sure our entire staff understands how important their lives are to us, how important their safety is to us, and how important a safe environment is to our customers.
As always we welcome your feedback and encourage your participation. How are you ensuring the safety of your workers? How do you make it a priority in your business? Let us know what you think.
-Brian Verble, CEO