KENNEWICK CONTRACTOR IS TOPS IN SAFETY
By JON SILVER
Journal Staff Reporter
CONSTRUCTION is a dangerous business. Just ask Dan Briscoe, vice president at Apollo, a contractor in Kennewick. A longtime employee there had a job-site accident and could have been killed, he said. The employee had been rushing through his work when he was hurt. The incident shook the company enough that it hired a new safety director, Mike Ellis, and committed itself to improving its safety practices. That was in 2000. Since then, Apollo’s safety program has been so successful that by at least one measure it can stake a claim as the safest company in the state. Owner Bruce Ratchford started the company in 1981 as Apollo Sheet Metal. The name pays homage to NASA’s Apollo program, which sent astronauts to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The company has since grown to comprise two businesses — Apollo Inc. and Apollo Sheet Metal — along with more than 700 employees and branches in Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Wolf Point, Mont. Combined revenues in 2010 were $222 million, according to the company. Apollo Inc. specializes in general contracting for water treatment, heavy-civil, commercial, designbuild and infrastructure projects. Apollo Sheet Metal, a mechanical contractor, performs work such as HVAC contracting and design, industrial piping and plumbing, and sheet-metal fabrication. Briscoe credited the company’s holistic approach to its work for its ingrained safety culture. “We don’t look at safety as different from all the other things we do,” he said.
THE EMR GETS LOW
The proof in the pudding is Apollo’s EMR, or experience modification rate, which the state Department of Labor and Industries uses to set workers’ compensation insurance premiums. An EMR of 1 means a company’s claims are average for a given industry, and the state sets the company’s workers’ compensation premiums accordingly. A lower EMR number means the company’s claims are lower than average for its industry. In Apollo’s case, its EMR has fallen from 1 in 2003 to 0.299 in 2011, the lowest private-sector EMR in Washington, according to Labor and Industries. (There was a state agency with an even lower EMR.) Last year, Apollo’s EMR was 0.331, good for second lowest in the state among private firms behind Enterprise Rent-A-Car, according to the company. “That is a great experience factor history,” said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for Labor and Industries. Companies can keep their EMR low by preventing injuries and getting injured workers back to work quickly, she said. Some companies keep injured workers on the payroll while they’re recuperating, bypassing the need to file claims. To be fair, EMR rates don’t provide direct safety comparisons between companies that operate in different industries. Jobs within companies are assigned different “risk classes” based on the likelihood of worker injuries. Desk-bound employees at an architectural firm would face a different mix of risks from employees at a logging company, and so the insurance premiums the two businesses would pay differ even if their EMRs were the same. Still, Apollo faces a lot of competition for the state’s lowest EMR. Fischer said the state insures approximately 163,000 companies. Another 300 companies are self-insured and don’t pay into the state fund.
BENEFITS
Apollo has improved its EMR in each of the last four years. The company’s incident rate, it says, is 61 percent lower than the construction industry average, and its “days away” and “restricted time” rate is 68 percent lower. The company benefits from its low EMR in a number of ways. First, its insurance premium is 70 percent lower than industry average, saving the company millions of dollars. Second, the low rate helps win new business. Briscoe said deep-pocketed clients can be targets for lawsuits when job-site injuries occur, and so having a clean safety record can be an advantage. For some clients, Apollo’s track record “is the only reason we go tour chance to go to work for them,” he said. The company takes a far-sighted approach to its safety planning, starting well ahead of groundbreaking. “We get involved during bid time,” said Jeff Grade, the safety manager, referring to estimators who must consider how the work will be performed. For Apollo, ensuring a safe job site involves not just careful project planning and execution, but taking an interest in the safety of its individual employees. “Our safety program has nothing to do with enforcing rules,” according to Ellis, the safety director. “It has to do with showing our guys why (being safe) is the right thing to do. I always try to catch guys doing the right thing. We try to make safety personal.” Sometimes that means applying a little shame, though not in a punitive way. A worker seen doing something risky, Briscoe said, might be asked some variation of “Does your wife know you’re doing that?”
SAFETY FOR ALL
Getting buy-in from employees isn’t always automatic, particularly with new hires. Briscoe compared the process to using sandpaper to wear down resistance. “It’s a hard adjustment,” he acknowledged, but the company’s safety message is continually reinforced, starting with the executive team and repeated by senior project managers, general superintendents and foremen. Employees soon see that it’s not just the safety director who’s talking about safety, it’s everyone. “When you have a young apprentice walk up to an old grizzled guy (to offer advice), that old grizzled guy takes a step back and sees where the lay of the land is,” Briscoe said. The company website has a page that discusses the basics of its safety program, replete with bullet points on topics such as training and pretask planning. But there’s nothing magic about its process. “We tend to believe we’re not the most creative people in the world, but we know a good idea when we see it,” Briscoe said. For example, when the company works on jobs as a subcontractor, Grade said, “we take something from other people we’re working around to improve our process.” The company regularly consults with its insurance carriers and Labor and Industries, Grade said, and solicits feedback from the federal Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration. The company also gathers its top subcontractors once in a while for safety presentations, brainstorming and problem-solving sessions. Grade and Ellis tow a barbecue to job sites, using the lure of a free lunch to talk about safety in an informal setting. While just about every construction company says it values safety, Briscoe said, Apollo wants its employees to understand that the company takes it seriously, “and (safety is) not just something we throw at them.”
Jon Silver can be reached by email
at jons@djc.om or by phone at (206) 622-8272
Apollo Contact:
Dan Briscoe, Vice President
1133 W. Columbia Drive Kennewick, WA 99336-3459 USA
Tel (509) 586-1104 Fax (509) 585-3686 Email info@apollosm.com