EllisDon safety leader explains how the reward is in the work as CSEA nomination deadline nears
EllisDon is a perennial contender for the Safest Construction Employer award when it comes time to hand out Canada’s Safest Employers Awards. But for Steve Chaplin, vice president health, safety, and environment at EllisDon, receiving an award, and even just being nominated, is recognition of the hard work of so many people within the company.
“It's about heart and it's about making a difference,” explains Chaplin, who says awards are not the goal, and are rather a by-product of a much bigger mission. For EllisDon, the objective is to grow and deepen its safety culture so that it becomes embedded in every single worker from the frontline to the C-suite.
“We're deepening the think of everybody goes home safe each night to their families. It's about making sure that we're knocking down complacency.”
Nominations for Canada's Safest Employers Awards have been extended until end of day Friday April 28. Don't delay - enter you nominational here.
Over the past year, Chaplin says one of the ways the company has been working to realize its safety ambitions is by embarking on a “listening tour.” Chaplin, along with other senior managers, visited work sites across the country. They met with more than 1,500 employees in group sessions, and conducted 171 one-on-one interviews with employees, all in effort to learn more about the frontline safety challenges.
Chaplin says they asked tough, introspective questions like, “Are we working on the right things? Are you on the bus with us? What are we missing? And they were good, honest conversations.”
Chaplin says they learned they needed to do more to bring their labourers and trades workers into the safety fold. Now those workers are being invited to attend safety meetings and go on leadership walks.
“They're paid by the union, but they've been with EllisDon, some of them 15 or 20 plus years, and they follow us from job to job to job, and in the past, we didn't stop and say, hey, would you like to join us for the walk and see life through their eyes.”
Perspective is sometimes needed if you want to reshape a culture from the bottom up, and you also need to achieve buy-in from those frontline workers. While EllisDon is doing that work, it isn’t being done to win a safety award, according to Chaplin. “It's a by-product. It's nice to have the recognition, but it's really about the care.”
Chaplin says the company is going through the nomination process for the CSEAs, which closes on Friday April 28th, after the deadline was extended beyond the original April 21st date.
Chaplin encourages anyone interested to submit a nomination, but says don’t do it for the award, do it because you believe your organization is making a difference. “Making safety personal, incremental change each and every day, doing something better than what you have before.”
He says when you put the work first, “the culture falls into place, the openness falls into place, the conversations fall in place, and then the safety performance and culture is a by-product of the work effort.”
And that’s how you win safety awards.
