At CJ Drilling Inc., the first company contact a new employee has is with a member of the safety department. "At the time of hire, each employee is put through a thorough safety orientation to ensure the new employee understands our safety culture and knows how to succeed," says Safety Director Martin Mohr.
To achieve safety excellence, the company has adopted a multi-faceted approach. "If you think of a safety program as a wheel and [these elements] as spokes, removing one of the spokes would compromise the integrity of the wheel."
The spokes to which Mohr refers are:
- Management commitment – "If company leadership does not endorse, support and live a safety culture, we would see no success," he says.
- Safety training – In addition to the orientation, task-specific safety training occurs throughout an employee's career with CJ Drilling.
- Safety auditing – "By auditing our work areas on a continual basis, we can identify hazardous acts and conditions and correct them before they become an incident or loss," says Mohr.
- Incident reporting/lessons learned – The company identifies all incidents to determine root cause and identify any gaps within the safety program. Investigation follow up includes a CJ Drilling Shared Lessons for Improved Performance report.
- Safety discipline – "Discipline is not a popular element of our safety program," Mohr admits, adding: "However, it is essential to the success. Safety discipline allows us to intervene when unsafe actions have the potential to result in injury or incident of loss. Our safety program does not provide a 'three-strike' opportunity, rather discipline is based on the severity of the violation."
Mohr says the company has set up a number of programs and processes that follow industry best practices – which go beyond OSHA compliance – and is a member of the International Association of Foundation Drillers so that it can remain aware of industry-wide best practices.
"As a contractor performing an extensive amount of work in the power generation, transmission and distribution industry, our safe work performance and safety programs are continuously reviewed and scrutinized," says Mohr. "We have never missed out on a project because of our safe work performance. We pride ourselves in being the most valuable and safest teammate in the foundation drilling industry."
CJ Drilling Inc.
Dundee, Ill.
115 employees/2 EHS professionals
Drilled shaft foundation construction