Safety is Primus’ number one priority and a condition of employment. It is a deeply held belief by our ownership and extended leadership team that every Primus team member should return home safely to their families at the end of each day.
This takes effort. Primus Safety Director Deric Winslett has been hard at work implementing our existing safety plan and identifying ways to improve it. This has included several initiatives:
- Developing a safety orange card that contains all pertinent safety information in one easy-to-access place
- Re-vamping our safety awards to honor our teammates exhibiting strong safety skills
- Re-emphasizing the importance of reporting incidents, accidents and near-misses
- Following the captive insurance improvement plan
- Working with human resources and our risk compliance officer to administratively mitigate risk
- Utilizing Safety Reports, an app-based program to support safety field audits, supervision safety observations, incident reporting and data analytics.
- Conducting targeted safety training using SafetyAmp
Because of this effort, Primus has achieved a record low EMR in 2023. A company’s EMR (Experience Modification Rate) is a number used by insurance companies to determine the likelihood that a business will be required to pay worker’s compensation claims. The industry standard is 1.0. Higher than 1.0, a firm is considered riskier. Lower than 1.0 and a firm is considered less risky.
Primus achieved an EMR score of 0.69. This is the lowest EMR score in our company’s history.
“What Deric and his team have achieved is very impressive,” said Director of Construction Tony Dembickie. “He continues to push all of us to do better and work as safely as possible.”
A client representative, when recently discussing Primus’s safety success, had this to say: “You all are doing things with your safety program that are very forward thinking – it’s impressive.”
“I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” said Deric. “In the end, it comes down to the men and women in the field who are putting safety first day in and day out. They’re the reason for our success.”
Congratulations to Deric and his team – Safety Manager Taylor Elliott and Safety Coordinator Kristin Grizzle. We look forward to seeing what’s next!