The winners of the 2024 Safety Standout Awards have been selected! Our latest honorees demonstrated a steadfast commitment to safety. Learn more here about our latest winners and runners-up.
Best Overall Safety Program and Culture: ESFM
ESFM USA® is the self-performing integrated facilities management (IFM) division of Compass Group, the world’s largest contract facilities and food services provider. ESFM clients include many of the Fortune 500, representing technology, oil and gas, life sciences and manufacturing markets.
ESFM’s safety program includes regular forums—from bimonthly Innovation Council meetings to regular incident review calls and consistent “SPARK” sessions on the company’s employee communication app. These foster engagement from all levels of the organization in identifying safety solutions specific to various areas of the business. Examples range from utilizing stainless steel eyewash/shower inspection tanks within regulated facilities to using drones to clean external windows to reduce risk related to working on lifts.
ESFM 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.
The company is taking a digital approach for reporting near-miss entries, reporting potential Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) violations and built-in automation so items are properly addressed. Saia LTL Freight uses a discreet approach to inform the reporting location when the issue is resolved and/or acknowledged. This has proven to be effective, as the employees understand their voice is heard. For the month of April 2024, the company had more than 3,000 near-miss entries company wide.
Saia LTL Freight has designed an in-house hazardous material training with additional elements for learning/reporting, which has proven effective for its CSA Basic. Since the training began, the company has successfully managed to drop its CSA basic to maintain under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration threshold for 15 consecutive months. The company has also started the process of migrating all training into a digital LMS platform. While this digital process does not replace in-person training methods, it allows employees to access training on demand.
Safety Technology and Innovation Award: Amazon
In Amazon’s sortable fulfillment centers, employees stow, pick, pack, and ship orders of single and multiple items to customers all around the globe. The Amazon Robotics team operates a fleet of industrial robots that work alongside employees through world-class technological innovations to improve safety and efficiency and meet customer demands.
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).
SI-GZ is a project that reduces MSD risk to stow and pick employees through two mechanisms: (1) directs employees to stow more “popular” inventory into the ergonomic “Golden Zone” of the storage pod and more unique inventory to the top and bottom of the storage pod.
The pilot projects were expanded to additional sites to confirm the functionality and safety impact. Currently, ErgoPick is running in all Amazon Robotics Sortable warehouses across North America, and overall, it has been deployed in 270 warehouses across 11 countries. SI-GZ has been deployed in 19 warehouses across North America and will be deployed across the network in the coming months.
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 trainings that bring together technical knowledge and hands-on approach to competency.
Bernards supports its leaders with ongoing training and education from multiple sources: insurance carriers, vendors, manufacturers, etc. Topics include (at a minimum) General Safety Hazard Awareness Training for Supervisors, Fall Protection Safety Training for Supervisors, Scaffold Safety Training for Supervisors, Mobile Equipment Safety Training for Supervisors, and other relevant construction hazard training.
Bernards has been recognized by the Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP) for its commitment to unify its safety culture by setting baseline competencies of safety knowledge and skills. Bernards was recognized in 2023 as a Sapphire Level Certification Champion and in 2024 as a Ruby Level Certification Champion. Certified staff include Vice Presidents, Project Staff, Project Superintendents, and Risk/Safety representatives. BCSP certification is recognized as the leader in safety, health, and environmental credentialing.
ESG Champion Award: Orbia
With a global team of over 24,000 employees, commercial activities in more than 100 countries and operations in more than 50, Orbia applies engineering acumen and ingenuity towards solving some of the world’s toughest challenges spanning food and water security, information access and connectivity and decarbonization and the energy transition.
Orbia has five distinct business groups comprised of industry-leading commercial businesses: Polymer Solutions (Vestolit and Alphagary), Building & Infrastructure (Wavin), Precision Agriculture (Netafim), Connectivity Solutions (Dura-Line) and Fluor & Energy Materials (Koura). Orbia strives to eliminate all injuries, reduce the environmental footprint of its processes and prevent adverse impacts from its operations and products especially as many of our employees work in high-risk environments, whether due to working with heavy machinery to create telecommunications conduit or manufacture PVC or working with chemicals and compounds.
Orbia is a signatory of the UN Global Compact, which encourages businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible practices to become global accelerators of the Sustainable Development Goals set forth by the United Nations General Assembly. Orbia has transparently linked its solution portfolio to the SDGs by product revenues that contribute either directly or indirectly to the goals. In 2023, 65% of Orbia revenues addressed SDG impact areas.
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. She was brought into Chobani as an EHS Specialist and was new to the manufacturing field. Eckert was promoted to EHS Supervisor in six months.
She currently holds the ASP designation through the BCSP and is a Certified Health Education Specialist through NCHEC. She is credited with the improvement of safety training compliance, taking the site of over 900 employees to a 99%+ authorized compliance rate in less than six months, while significantly improving the training content and improving training understanding for the company’s English as a second-language employees.
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.
A Nod to Our Safety Standout Awards Runners-Up for 2024
We would also like to congratulate several outstanding runners-up that were selected in certain 2024 Safety Standout Awards categories:
Best Overall Safety Program and Culture: Honeywell FM&T’s Kansas City National Security Campus
Innovations in Safety Training: Asahi Kasei Plastics North America
Safety Technology and Innovation Award: AtkinsRealis US Nuclear
Moving Beyond Compliance: EDF Renewables North America
ESG Champion Award: Engro Fertilizer.
Young Safety Professional Excellence Award: Gonzalo Llamas
Please join us in congratulating all of our Safety Standout Award winners and runners-up on their well-deserved recognition as leaders in the safety field! You can watch the awards ceremony here.
And be sure to keep an eye on our awards home page to see when our next round of Safety Standout Awards opens up for nominations—your organization could be the next to be recognized in 2025!