As the warmer seasons start to inch closer, Korellis’ field team is going to be busy for the next several months. Korellis hosted its 24th annual Safety Fest to promote safety practices and ensure that every team member, including roofers, sheet metal workers, masons, and carpenters, is ready to take on the season with safety as a top priority.
Ronnie Strain, Director of Operations, believes that safety has always been the most important part of Korellis’ success when working on various job sites.
“We hold safety in the highest regard,” Strain said. “Any opportunity that we get have to offer more training and celebrate the safety culture that we reinforce have established, we’re going to take advantage of it.”
Korellis emphasizes safety fundamentals each year while also incorporating new concerns in a way that is both engaging and fun for everyone involved.
We have a couple of new innovative styles of guard rails,” Strain said. “Before we release those to the field, we’re making sure that everybody has proper training and knows the setup. We have ergonomics to help with reducing soft-tissue injuries on job sites and enforce proper lifting techniques. Our desire is that our employees all return home from work the way they came. We put no price on our employee’s safety and will provide them with the proper tools and training to ensure that can happen.”
Jeff Myres, Sheet Metal Foreman, looks forward to this opportunity to learn from different departments about safety with the entire team every year.
This is a time for us to all get together and for the instructors to show us all the different safety events that will help us on our job sites,” Myres said. “We do fall arrest training in case we fall with the harness on, so we know how to rescue ourselves. We learn about how to stretch our core. We have a defensive driving part this year, but it’s just to update us on things we wouldn’t have thought about before.”
One station had a harness and a rope to mimic scaling a building to the rooftop. Other departments focused on creating guardrails and scaffolds.
“We’re building scaffolds because some of us really don’t get the chance to do it often,” Myres said. “It helps because they’re able to provide us with feedback on if we’ve been doing anything wrong. Somebody can say, ‘That’s good, but let’s change that a little bit.’ It helps to have that type of assistance.”
Nikko Hernandez, foreman, has attended the Safety Fest multiple years. While he has a good understanding of most of the practices, he believes Safety Fest is a good way to brush up on these skills.
“This is my fourth year doing Safety Fest,” Hernandez said. “It’s something different that helps us get dialed in for the warmer seasons ahead. It’s a good recap for someone like me, because it’s easy to forget when you aren’t doing some of these practices often.”
In his four years of participating in the event, Hernandez has seen how the instruction has evolved over the years to keep up with industry trends.
“It’s always different depending on the group of guys you’re in,” Hernandez said. “You’re always in different groups rotating. You might be with a bunch of skilled tradespeople, or you could be the one with the most experience in the group. For the shop locations, they stay the same every year. Most of the awareness and specific skill-based training is presented here every year. It helps us stay consistent and understand what is needed of us.”
Korellis promotes hands-on experience to help get the field team acclimated to the job site in real time. However, it might require a different approach when it comes to inexperienced members. Derek Crews, director of safety, finds the balance between helping people out from both areas of experience.
When we have many young apprentices, a classroom setting is sometimes the best way for them to initially learn,” Crews said. “On-the-job training can be equally as important. When our workers encounter something for the first time in a classroom setting, their on-the-job experiences going forward then reinforce what they learned at safety fest. An example being, we aim to ensure our workers receive frequent training on the basics of guardrail setup and use, prior to expecting them to safely assemble a complex guardrail system at their job site.”
Crews appreciates the Korellis team coming together and dedicating this day to the safety of their workers. He knows that the training can pay dividends once the field gets back to their job sites and applies everything they’ve learned.
“We have more than 100 employees on jobsites every day,” Crews said. “The company needs us to understand things such as team building and fall protection. For me, properly preparing our team and giving them the tools to do the job safely is our top priority. We want to do it safely and treat each other right out there. We are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that happens for our guys.”
Korellis also served burgers hot off the grill to thank instructors, tradespeople, and everyone who participated in making this event another success.
For more information on Korellis, you can visit its website.
