Southeastern Wisconsin companies vie for corporate safety awards

for Wisconsin Corporate Safety Awards
Seventeen southeastern Wisconsin companies have been named as finalists in the seventh annual Wisconsin Corporate Safety Award competition. A total of 74 companies from the state were named as finalists by the Wisconsin Council of Safety (WCS) and the Department of Workforce Development.
There are 16 different award categories based on SIC code and then by size, according to WCS director Bryan Roessler. Awards are not only based on incident rates, but also on a description of each company’s safety and health programs and initiatives.
“They have to submit up to a 10-page report telling us about their initiatives, their programs, their incentives, their management commitments, their goals, their objectives, their strategies,” Roessler said. “And then we award them.”
Companies can nominate themselves or be nominated by other organizations such as insurance companies, chambers of commerce or local safety councils. There is no limit on the number of times a company can win. “It’s whoever is the best, and it’s very competitive,” Roessler said, noting several companies have won three or four years in a row.
Keith Gennerman, operations manager for Reich Tool & Design, Menomonee Falls, was surprised to hear the company had made the list of finalists because he didn’t have time to fill out the extensive questionnaire, but did say the company was moving to formalize policies for its safety program.
Reich Tool & Design builds and designs stamping dies for the precision metal-working industry. Gennerman credits his highly skilled labor force for Reich’s low incident rate.
“They’re very aware of what could be hazards to working with the machine tools and working with the equipment and the tools that we build,” Gennerman said.
And since Wisconsin’s economy has shifted from industrial toward the service economy, it takes safety award programs to remind the non-industrially employed of some of the dangers that others face on a daily basis.
Gennerman listed injuries that are typical in his industry, from minor cuts to finger, hand and foot damage. Workers’ eyes are also at risk because of the metal chips inherent with the machining process.
Jeff Jordan, operations manager with Overhead Material Handling of Oak Creek – also named one of this year’s finalists – knows the hazards the company’s employees face and has worked continuously for the past eight or nine years to minimize accidents and prepare employees by training them to respond to emergency situations. The company manufactures, installs and services overhead cranes.
When asked what a common injury is in his industry if safety precautions aren’t followed, Jordan didn’t hesitate to answer. “The most severe in our industry is death, because we are working at elevations from ground level up to 50 to 100 feet in the air,” Jordan said. “And that’s on a common basis – every day, all day – that’s what we do.
“More likely, there are problems with electrocution because we’re working with live energy sources, we’re working with every hazardous chemical and situation in the state of Wisconsin,” Jordan continued.
The safety programs at Overhead Material Handling began with the thought of CPR training. But looking at the big picture, the fact that so many employees were in the field, company management broadened their view on medical training. They train employees on everything from blood-borne pathogens to crane-hoist safety to Department of Transportation standards for people who drive trucks.
Jordan is particularly proud of the company’s get-tough policy on its requirements for wearing fall-protection equipment. It has a zero-tolerance policy, meaning that if an individual forgets to put his fall protection on before climbing into something as non-threatening as a scissors lift, he will be discharged immediately, according to Jordan. The severity of violating the policy ingrains into the employees’ minds what could happen should they fall and not be protected.
Since he is not a full-time safety director and he’s developed the company’s policies based on self-study, Jordan invited members of OSHA to come in and review the company’s policies to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. The report he got back from OSHA concluded that the company has the same amount of policies and programs in place equivalent to a company with 100 to 500 employees, even though Overhead Material Handling has 33 employees.
“That in itself was a pretty good compliment on OSHA’s part,” Jordan said. Shortly after the OSHA visit, he received the nomination forms for the Wisconsin Corporate Safety Awards.
“The reason we do this is we want these people to be out there and get the recognition they deserve, to let everyone else in their industry come in and say, ‘How are they doing it? What are they doing that we’re not?'” Roessler says. “So we can get everybody up to that tier at some point. So it’s a learning device, a networking device for other companies to learn from.”
The award ceremony will be held on April 24 at the Madison Marriott.
April 13, 2001 Small Business Times