America’s Safest Companies 2016: Saulsbury Industries

Since its founding in 1967 by C.R. “Dick" Saulsbury, Saulsbury Industries has treated employees like family. Employees are empowered to own work processes and are committed to working without injury or incident.

“Our mission as a company is to provide services that consistently meet or exceed customer and employee expectations through continuous improvement in safety, quality, growth and mutual profitability, while maintaining the highest level of honesty and integrity," said Eddie Gonzales, corporate EHS director at Saulsbury Industries. “We will be uncompromising in providing for the safety and health of our employees, customers, subcontractors and the public, while protecting the environment. Our fundamental belief in honesty, charity and service to others is our legacy to our employees and our community."

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In addition to the Stop Work Authority program, the company offers the Huddle Up Process. This process is a setup that is performed in the field three times daily. The times selected for the Huddle Up meetings are based on company-wide trending data that identifies the three peak times related to incidents.

Employees ask questions of each other to determine how well the group is performing and the meetings, which last approximately five minutes, are facilitated by different employees each time.

The company also has a Pre-Task Analysis process, which allows employees to review all potential hazards prior to beginning the work day. The PTA process requires every crew member to be involved in pre-planning and understand all steps and assignments related to the work plan.

Saulsbury has created a supervisor training curriculum that heavily focuses on safety and includes occupational safety and health processes and policies, communication and organizational factors, safe work practices, incident investigation, medical case management and OSHA/DOT/EPA/state regulations, among other topics.

Supervisors and employees know that safety ranks high with company leaders, said Gonzales.

"Senior and executive management conduct unannounced field visits regularly. Their visits are recognized by our employees as leadership's commitment to safety excellence. Work crews will stop a senior manager when they enter a designated work area to review the Pre-Task Analysis with them as part of our information sharing and hazard recognition process," he noted.