Our Safety Team: Making a Difference Every Day
A few weeks ago we shared a summary of the steps we’re taking to mitigate risks associated with Coronavirus on job sites and at our branch offices. Today we’d like to highlight the people behind those policies. The people who have been working day and night to keep our people safe and our projects moving forward: our Safety Team.
Meet the Team
Our in-house safety team is led by Anabella Perez, our Director of Corporate Safety and Loss Prevention. Anabella has been leading our Safety Department since 2006 and has taken on the tremendous job of making sure our teams and job sites stay safe as the company and our headcount continues to grow. To do that, she has built an award-winning Safety Team.
Our Safety Team has grown to five full-time members, including Laura Blackwell, our Safety Manager/Trainer who is responsible for leading all the industrial safety training. During the Coronavirus crisis, Laura has been pivotal in shifting some of our training online so we can continue to keep our team safe and current on the latest safety practices and regulations.
In addition to our team based out of headquarters, we have Safety Officers who spend their time on job sites. They play a vital role providing essential safety information and communicating with our field employees and clients.
Our Safety Officers, working with job site Foreman and Superintendents, lead on-site safety meetings daily where they can not just pass on new policies, but gather feedback from our field employees on job site conditions. This two-way flow of information facilitated by our Safety Officers is essential in allowing us to maintain our high standards of safety.
Crisis Management
During normal times, maintaining job site and worker safety is a full-time job for our Safety Team. During the Coronavirus, they’ve all had to work even harder to keep our people safe and healthy. Even something like getting first aid to someone with an injury has taken on new challenges during the crisis, but our Safety Team is resilient, creative, and most of all dedicated to the health and safety of our people.
As we navigate the crisis, our Safety Team must constantly adapt to new information as it comes from both the CDC and OSHA, and communicate new policies and procedures across our 900-person organization distributed across multiple states. It’s a tremendous logistical challenge, but it’s one our Safety Team has risen to day after day.
In these unprecedented times, our Safety Team is leading the way to keep our people and our job sites safe. This includes sharing the latest safety information with our foremen and superintendents all the way down to providing hands-on training on how to properly wear masks, practice social distancing, and sterilizing tools.
We’ve even had to expand our orientation program to onboard new employees in both job site AND COVID-19 safety – just another day at the office (and on the job site) for our Safety Team.
We couldn’t do our jobs without the Safety Team doing theirs. Here’s to you, Anabella, Laura, Diana, Viviana, and Joel!