America's Safest Companies 2019: Mark Young Construction
Mark Young Construction
Frederick, CO
General contractor
124 employees | 14 sites | 1 EHS professional
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Mark Young Construction, a general contractor, views safety as a core value that will help retain its workforce.
“In today’s economy, we cannot afford to lose good employees to another company,” explains Lance Murray, safety manager. “Safety is one way that the company communicates and markets to prospective employees and students graduating from college programs. If employees begin to see safety slipping and injuries happening, morale can go down and we have the potential to lose good employees to competitors.”
While understanding the role that safety plays in talent management, the company has a unique take on safety in general. “Our company does not believe that safety is our number one priority and regulatory compliance is not what our safety program is about,” says Murray. “We are a general contractor and not a safety company. We are a safe general contractor. We do not have the luxury of pulling everyone off the job to perform safety training all day, every day. If safety were really number one, we would just pay people to stay home in bed. The reality of any construction company is that we get paid to build things. By integrating safety into all aspects of the project, we are ultimately moving safety from a separate and standalone function within the organization to an intentional culture of the way we do business.”
To ensure that safety is integral to all actions, over the past three years Mark Young Construction has put a lot of time and resources in building up its safety culture by establishing procedures and creating strong working relationships between safety and production functions. The result is that if a choice has to be made between production and safety, the company will not compromise on safety.
“We preach to all of our employees that we make 35,000 decisions a day, and each one of those decisions has an element of risk and safety attached to it,” says Murray. “Our decisions ultimately influence our behaviors and our behaviors influence our safety.”