The Metro Indianapolis Coalition for Construction Safety (MICCS) presented its annual safety awards on April 30, 2015. Connor Fine Painting won a prestigious Zero Injury Award for completing 62,935 labor hours without injury. Wait a minute. Take that in. ZERO employee injuries on any industrial, commercial, or residential painting job in a trade where ladders, lifts, and paint coatings are used every day. Our first recorded year of zero injuries was in 2010. The year 2014 marked our 5th consecutive year of zero injuries. It’s worth noting that Connor Fine Painting was the only painting contractor in the room which was filled with companies like Dow AgroScience, Eli Lilly, IPL and Citizens Energy Group. They also happen to be our customers which is no small feat as they have among the most stringent safety requirements possible.
We didn’t accomplish this by accident. (Groan.) From the start of our company, Connor Fine Painting placed safety as a top priority. Our record was good, but we wanted more than good when it came to the safety of our professional painters. About 5 years ago, we began working with RMS Safety to assess our company and our painters safety program to identify areas for improvement. One of our goals was to become a MICCS Certified Contractor. If we were aiming for exemplary, we knew we needed to employ even more stringent safety standards than OSHA’s regulations and rules. We needed our employees to become ambassadors of our “safety first” culture.
With help from our partnership with MICCS and RMS Safety, we were able to create a safety program targeting specific hazards in the painting industry. We appointed a long time and well-respected employee, John White, as our safety director. John oversees our work practices and ensures that a “safety first” mentality is adopted by each and every employee. Our culture of safety was established, in large part, through our mandatory all-employee Monday morning meetings. We start each week with a painters safety program to increase awareness and proficiency in all safety matters.
In the end, it’s really our painters’ accomplishment. They consistently make the right decisions and follow all safety protocols. We are honored to share in MICCS mission — “the elimination of construction and facilities maintenance jobsite injuries with the ultimate objective of returning construction and maintenance workers home to their families, friends, and communities free from harm”.
