Impressive safety practices and a commitment to employee protection earned nine Indiana businesses 2014 Governor’s Workplace Safety Awards. Could one of their award-winning ideas work at your company? Keep reading to find out.

“These companies represent the best of the best,” said Indiana Department of Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble. “They demonstrate a commitment not only to protecting their employees, but also to ensuring employees understand the importance of workplace safety and health.”

Awards were announced at the recent Indiana Safety and Health Conference and Expo.  Check out the innovative practices that put these companies on top. 

1. Gribbins Insulation Company added an additional safety meeting each month to focus on a single training topic like aerial work platforms, confined spaces, or scaffold safety. Employees must test out of each topic with a score of 80 percent or higher.
2. Steinberger Construction, Inc., provides industrial design and construction services in north central Indiana and surrounding states. Steinberger Construction recently enlisted employees to help develop three new training courses on topics including construction fundamentals, leadership training, and general safety training.

3. Hagerman, Inc., a contracting firm, reworked its safety and health tracking method. The employer puts the emphasis on leading indicators like employee perception surveys and near-miss reporting over traditional lagging indicators like DART rates.
4. BMWC Constructors is a general contractor that performs multi-million dollar capital projects, maintenance services, and more for the petrochemical, refining, biotechnology, healthcare, manufacturing, and food processing industries. The company created an “innovation catalog” system accessible through the company Intranet that allows any new health and safety or process improvement idea that has been successfully implemented at a BMWC jobsite to be catalogued, stored, and shared across the company.
5. Aisin Chemical Indiana, LLC, developed a risk analysis program that teaches employees the skills they need to assess risk in their operations, allowing for better prioritization of safety measures. The program has also increased worker productivity.
6. Westech Bulding Products, which produces approximately 35 million pounds of PVC fence and decking each year, altered its method of cutting extruded PVC to length.  Instead of the industry standard method of using a “traveling cut off saw,” Westech adopted a new guillotine cutter system. The new system removed nearly all plastic dust from the process, lowered noise levels in the facility, and reduced laceration hazards because employees are no longer required to interact with a sharp saw blade.
7. Closure Systems International, Inc., produces closures for beverage and oil containers. Company employees participate in a minimum of three protective activities each month on topics including hazard recognition, employee behavior, and safety and health compliance observations. In addition, the company has created a program it calls "Take a Minute Be Safe," which asks employees to think through seven safety-related questions before beginning a task.
8. MacLellan Integrated Services provides water and dry ice blasting services for the automotive industry. An improved safety training program requires employees involved in blasting to wear an indicator showing their current level of training on their hard hat at all times. Since the new program was implemented, there have been no injuries.
9. Taghleef Industries, Inc., which makes polypropylene film, created a volunteer safety audit team made up of shop floor and supervisory employees from across the country. Team members conduct in-depth audits of the plant four times a year.