Park West Cos. — a West Coast landscape contracting firm headquartered in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif. — values safety so much that it has a dedicated safety department for its more than 1,600 employees.
The safety culture spans across divisions throughout California, as well as Las Vegas.
The man in charge of it all is Juan Gonzales, the company’s director of safety and risk management.
But he won’t take any of the credit. He says his team of six safety managers “make it happen.”
And even then, it’s not only the safety managers, it’s every individual employee.
“Everybody watches out for each other,” he says. “It’s our belief that you need to get everybody to buy in, and get everybody’s participation, in order to have a successful program.”
Employees at the $176 million company are rewarded for good behavior and for working safely.
“We try to do our very best to show our employees from the beginning that we truly do care about them and their families,” Gonzales says. “We respect their lives and others’.”
Gonzales says instead of placing blame, the safety team helps employees understand the importance of following the rules.
“We give them the reason as to why they need to follow a protocol,” he says. “For example, we need you to wear ear plugs because we don’t want you to lose your hearing. We want you to be able to hear your grandkids.”
Employees report every accident, incident and near-miss at Park West. Gonzales says in doing so, the company is able to determine the root cause. “We want to know what makes an employee think it was OK to take a shortcut,” he says.
According to Gonzales, 98 percent of the time an incident is from human error or trying to take a shortcut.
“Life is so valuable. It only takes a second for someone to suffer a serious injury,” Gonzales says. “Our primary objective every day is to welcome employees to work and then, at the end of the day, send them home.”
Every single employee in the field has to buy into the safety program at Park West to make it successful, he says. Invest the time with new and current employees to explain safety rules and their importance.
Gonzales says he tells the crews that five minutes of safety is not a waste of time. He says to them, “We’re investing five minutes of our time to try and prevent an injury. Yes, we’re crazy busy and we’ve got to get this done, but five minutes of our time now will pay dividends.”
Gonzales says the investment of time is the biggest fundamental of safety. When companies bid jobs, some only look at the direct cost and the bottom line, he says. The indirect cost and lost time when an individual gets hurt is sometimes overlooked.
For example, a four-person crew is down to three if one gets hurt. The foreman also needs to leave the job to take the injured employee to a clinic. Production time is lost.
Even the smallest injuries are expensive.
Along with six safety managers, Park West has a safety analyst who examines the indirect cost of injuries. If an employee suffers a cut on his finger, Gonzales says, the direct cost is about a $500 check to a clinic. But the indirect cost is a different story. After adding up hours of lost time, the indirect cost can be up to $8,000.
Gonzales says the reason he got started in this business is because he cares about people.
“It’s hard to put into words what we do every day,” Gonzales says. “Safety is not just about compliance. To us, it’s more about the people, the human element.”
