July 2010 Safety Message

Growth in Safety vs Growth in the Business

As we look back to a few years ago when the business was growing rapidly and our number of employees was increasing every month it was evident that our growth in safety did not keep up to our growth in the business. Both must grow in parallel and what we saw was a diluted safety culture with so many new employees and unable to keep up with the demands of communicating our safety culture to all new employees. Many of our projects during the years 2006 through late 2008 grew in numbers more than 100% and some of these same projects struggled in safety performance with so many new employees.

In the past six months our number of field employees has increased by more than 50% from December 2009. Going forward we expect these numbers to grow even more as our growth in the business continues during the next business year. One of the reasons we adopted a standard safety culture presentation for all new employees coming into the company, was to communicate our safety culture here at Cementation to every single new employee. I cannot stress the importance of our orientations for new employees and especially in these times of growth. This is the first step to setting the foundation for safety in every new employee. From there the foundation for maintaining a strong safety culture depends on the entire group and comprises good communication, trust and respect. We look for experience but we need to train the inexperienced. We expect a level of common sense but we still have to show our people how to work safely rather than tell them to work safe. Respect works both ways and builds relationships within to heighten satisfaction resulting in safe work performance.

To achieve our goal of Zero Harm for all our employees at work and at home it is paramount that our safety culture keeps pace with our business growth through communication and responsibility to ensure every single new employee understands the concepts of our safety culture.

Many say lessons learned are a good thing for continuous improvement but learning this lesson from years previous on the backs of injured employees is not a good lesson learned. Let’s not repeat it.