Safety
Our Commitment to Safety
For nearly thirty five years, RSG Landscaping has taken safety as its number one priority for both our team members and our customers. All members of the RSG team are empowered to make safety improvements in our daily tasks, as safety has no boss. It’s all of our responsibilities for us and for you.
How do we drive the culture of safety?
- A full time Safety Director on staff to ensure OSHA compliance, quality control, job-site inspections, regulation compliance, and safe & proper working conditions.
- Weekly safety meetings lead by a new team member each week with the topic of their choice followed by discussion of last week’s topic and how it proactively affected their week.
- A full database of MSDS sheets on site.
- Job Hazard sheets filled out in entirety before work commences and reviewed together as a team before work is to start at a minimum of every week.
- Weekly awards to team members for bringing up proactive measures in making tasks safer or new ideas for more efficiency.
One of our recent weekly Safety Meetings on proper methods to maintain equipment between job sites:
EMR
From our weekly safety meetings lead by a different member of our team each week, to having a FT Safety Director that ensures we are continuing our commanding concentration on the topic, to making sure all employees know that safety has no boss – it is all of our responsibilities, we cannot emphasize it enough: safety is priority #1.
However, how can this be proven or quantified?
EMR, or Experience Modification Rate, was originally designed and still is used to calculate insurance premiums for each type of industry and employee classification. However, since sometime in the 1980’s, a company’s EMR has been used as a guide by private industry to evaluate the overall expertise and quality of company and more importantly, the commitment to safety of a company they may hire to perform work on their site. It takes three years of experience and generally around $5,000.00 in annual premiums to obtain an EMR. Your EMR revolves around a three-year plan. Annually however, the first year is excluded. Companies who perform average in their industry will generally see an EMR rate of 1.5-1.0. Companies with many claims will have a higher than average rate, for example, 1.9.
“RSG Landscaping, LLC’s EMR rating as of 2017 is 0.76”
Message from RSG’s Safety Director
RSG employs over 140 employees at four branch offices that are located in Charlottesville, Concord, Richmond and Roanoke, Virginia. We have a fleet of over 70 vehicles, more than 45 trailers and a wide range of equipment. My primary duty is to establish and enforce company safety policies that are designed to ensure a safe work environment for all RSG employees, RSG clients and any member of the general public that may be visiting any of our facilities or work sites. This is accomplished by having an ever evolving safety program, which has the full support upper management combined with active participation of every RSG crew member. We hold weekly safety meetings with required attendance in which every crew member participates. RSG offers employee incentives, which encourages its employees to be safety conscious, along with additional rewards for going above and beyond in their work efforts.
We conduct new employee orientations when they are employed and provide them with the necessary personal protection equipment. We have a substance abuse policy that includes pre-employment, random, accident/injury, reasonable suspicion and return to work testing.
Many of our crew members are certified in First Aid, CPR and the proper use of an AED. We are constantly looking for ways to teach our work force how to identify and safely work around work site hazards. Before work begins, crew members that will be working on the site complete a Pre-task inspection. This is designed to help identify hazards, take actions to avoid the hazards and identify what type of personal protection equipment will be required to complete the job safely.
I, along with the organization’s Superintendents and Branch Managers, frequently conduct unannounced work site safety inspections and document any observed safety violations. When a safety violation is observed, corrective action is taken to prevent the violation from reoccurring. Copies of these inspections are sent to the President and Vice-president for their review. If an accident or injury does occur, we conduct a detailed investigation to determine the cause and take preventive measures to prevent it from happening again.
Here at RSG, we are very proud of our safety record and are committed to providing a safe work environment for our crew members that will meet or exceed OSHA requirements before any work begins.