Every year, EHS Today selects the safest companies from a competitive pool of applicants and presents them with an America’s Safest Companies award. This corporate award was founded in 2002 to recognize companies that find innovative solutions to safety challenges; maintain injury and illness rates lower than industry average; demonstrate support from management; foster employee involvement in safety; offer comprehensive training programs; effectively communicate the value of safety; and more.
The 2011 winners include: ACCO Brands Corp., Buffalo Gap Instrumentation & Electrical Co. Inc., Caterpillar Inc., EnPro Industries, EuroKera North America, Fluor Corp., Gribbins Insulation Co. Inc., Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies LLC, Kennametal Inc., Nalco Co., Richard Goettle Inc. and Savage Services. Visit EHS Today’s America’s Safest Companies page to learn more about each winning company.
The award program is supported by Platinum Sponsor MCR Safety and Silver Sponsor PureSafety, two organizations committed to promoting safe work environments.
The Academy Awards of Safety
The 2011 America’s Safest Companies award reception opened with a cocktail hour to allow winning company representatives, EHS Today staff and sponsors to mingle and network. The evening then progressed to dinner and presentation of the awards. Larry Garner, chief marketing officer of MCR Safety, remarked that the event felt like “the Academy Awards of safety.”
EHS Today Editor Sandy Smith, who presented winning companies with their awards, said, “Every company here being honored with an America’s Safest Companies award should feel proud because they are the best of the best.”
The evening concluded with safety keynotes presented by Dr. Richard D. Fulwiler, president of Technology Leadership Associates, and Don Hutson, author, motivational speaker and CEO of U.S. Learning.
Fulwiler provided an overview of transactional and transformational leaders and how these different styles can impact a work force. Transactional leaders, he explained, are task-oriented, strive to maintain the status quo, tend to focus on the work more than the worker and typically do not generate engagement.
Transformational leadership, meanwhile, empowers the worker to engage in the work process, aligns workers’ and employers’ values, results in the leader personally engaging with the employee, focuses on both the work and the worker and, finally, drives engagement.
“To drive health and safety excellence, engagement has to be part of it,” Fulwiler explained. “If you get the head and the heart of workers, they’ll give you safety excellence.”
Hutson spoke about leadership in the safety world, stressing that a work force will only be as concerned about safety initiatives as its leader. Great leaders, Hutson continued, are resilient; persuade rather than demand; actively communicate with their workers; embrace change rather than become victims of change; and are dedicated to taking their workers to the next level through training and engagement.
“I know America’s work force is safer because of the people in this room,” Hutson said at the award ceremony.
The November issue of EHS Today magazine includes a special section on the America’s Safest Companies winners. Photos from the award ceremony will be available online in the coming weeks.