“The Safety Standout Awards committee had some difficult choices to make this year, thanks to the impressive submissions we received in all six categories,” said EHS Daily Advisor Editor-in-Chief Jay Kumar. “It’s heartening to know that businesses large and small are going above and beyond to ensure that their workers can go home safely at the end of each day.”

This year’s Safety Standout Awards featured six awards. Learn more about our latest winners below.

Best Overall Safety Program and Culture: ESFM

ESFM USA® has experienced rapid growth in a short period of time across various business lines, and continues to secure and mobilize new business, but its safety culture has remained steadfast, evidenced by a five-year Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) average of 1.61. While the TRIR has fluctuated slightly up and down during that timeframe of onboarding over 2,000 associates, ESFM has continuously maintained industry-leading safety performance.

Innovations in Safety Training Award: Saia LTL Freight

Saia LTL Freight decided to move away from traditional cookie cutter training content and custom tailor its own content, enabling the company to focus on issues that its employees encounter daily. All the training content is crafted in house and delivered through multiple avenues, being in-person or digitally.

Safety Technology and Innovation Award: Amazon

A multidisciplinary team within Amazon was assembled to work on technology and software developments to achieve a common goal of continuing to reduce MSD risk in the stowing and picking processes. The team’s goal was to use technology to optimize the storage location of inventory for the ergonomic benefit of both the stowing and picking employees. Two projects were initiated to achieve this: (1) the Stow Intelligence-Golden Zone (SI-GZ) project and (2) Ergonomic-Aware Pick-Assignments (ErgoPick).

This award is sponsored by Avetta.

Moving Beyond Compliance Award: Bernards

Bernards is an employee-owned multidisciplinary commercial builder and construction management company. The company’s Risk Engineers are involved in each project from the early stages of bidding to closure of the project, leading to postmortem analysis for risk improvement once the job is complete. The team continues to work side by side with operations staff to assure safety is a top priority. The Bernards’ Operations staff is committed to mentoring subcontractors and establishing a safe climate on each project. These individuals will receive frequent safety leadership training that bring together technical knowledge and hands-on approach to competency.

ESG Champion Award: Orbia

In pursuit of continuous improvement, Orbia has created a first-of-its-kind performance indicator called the ImpactMark. The ImpactMark shows the company’s year-over-year progress on six key ESG indicators: reducing waste sent to landfill; reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing women in management, optimizing investments, upskilling the Orbia workforce and evolving into an innovative solutions provider through R&D investments. The outermost ring represents the most recent year and Orbia’s progression towards a perfect circle.

Young Safety Professional Excellence Award: Rachel Eckert

Rachel Eckert is Environmental Health and Safety Supervisor at Chobani.

Eckert has identified, developed, coordinated, and implemented multiple capital projects to provide significant improvements with walking working surfaces, hazardous energy control, and general site safety. She implemented a site Employee Safety and Health Committee, which now functions nearly independently with such a level of interest that the company had to offer committees on each shift and have a wait list for participants. Each month she works with committee chair members to identify areas of need, create training, and conduct audits with the teams to identify and resolve safety risks in their areas.

Please join us in congratulating all our Safety Standout Award winners and runners-up on their well-deserved recognition as leaders in the safety field!

For a full description of their achievements, read the full article here: https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/2024/08/safety-standout-awards-2024-meet-our-latest-honorees/

About the EHS Daily Advisor
The EHS Daily Advisor offers free webcasts, articles, and reports on key environment and safety topics and issues like chemicals, electrical safety, emergency preparedness and response, enforcement and inspection, safety culture and behavioral safety, training, EHS career trends/certification, and more. Subscribers are delivered a free new issue every business day right in their e-mail inbox, with 24/7 access to all content in an online archive at https://ehsdailyadvisor.blr.com/.