Company Name: Trendmaker Homes
City: Houston, TX
Number of Employees: 130

Nomination Essay:

Trendmaker Homes believes that no phase of its operation is of greater importance than the prevention of injury AND the safe keeping of our greatest asset - our people. Our strategies and goals ensure that this vision remains at the forefront and is always considered an essential component of the success of our company.

Safety First = People First.

Trendmaker's safety program was developed from four principals.

1. Safety First from the Top: In order for a safety program to have merit, it must come from the very top. Trendmaker's senior leadership is committed to safety. Not just through rhetoric and written policy, but through their actions and the priorities they establish. Their involvement in our safety program creates a "culture of safety" that is accepted as a norm among our employees. Employees recognize that the leader's attitude is not "do as I say", but "do as I do". Some of the ways that our executives, including the president, contribute to the safety program are:

• Performing regular jobsite visits that focus on safety at our homes under construction
• Leading safety discussions at construction meetings
• Meeting quarterly with members of the safety team to discuss ongoing safety improvements and make suggestions to safety programs
• Being a champion for a health or safety topic and promoting that issue to employees

2. Employee Driven: A company's programs can not succeed with out active, ongoing support from the employees. The more employees participate, the more safety becomes a part of the company culture. We have various safety activities for employees to participate in, take leadership roles in, and receive information from. Here are some of them:

• Comprehensive 10week new employee orientation
• Ongoing mandatory health and safety training including but not limited to: injury reporting, jobsite safety, personal safety, workplace violence, risk assessment, ladder safety, and other topics specific to our superintendents such as fall protection, LOTO, HazCom, scaffolding basics & PPE.
• New model safety walks where employees volunteer to walk our models and ensure that safety was taken into account during interior design
• Regular safety inspections are performed by employees of all offices both at corporate and in the field
• Regular safety meetings are held both in our sales and construction offices
• Monthly safety meetings are held at corporate led by volunteer employees
• Safety is on every employee's performance management plan and is a major consideration in promotions and advancement in the company.

3. Basics Done Well: Trendmaker understands that company programs can sometimes get bogged down in paperwork and processes. One of Trendmaker's safety program goals is to ensure the efficiency and relevancy of all our programs. There should always be a reason for doing something and we always look to improve our processes and programs. Though any regulated program will have unavoidable documentation and procedural requirements, Trendmaker attempts to keep these to a minimum and redirect focus on what really matters. The goal is not to focus on the bureaucracy of safety but to keep the focus on people and the prevention of injury. Some actions we take to meet this are:

• Perform annual Health & Safety audit, provided by our parent company, to ensure that all our programs and processes meet federal regulation and parent company standards
• Perform annual safety systems analysis that includes incident trends, inspection results, site audit results, etc to ensure that our focus on injury prevention remains clear.
• Encourage and request employee and contractor feedback.
• Using the results from the above analyses, Trendmaker develops and uses an operational action plan that will cover all aspects of our safety program - both ongoing and improvement actions - to ensure that items noted are tracked through completion.

4. Sharing Best Practices: For years now, Trendmaker Homes has been a leader in promoting health and safety not only to our employees, but also to our contractors, competitors, and building partners in our developments. Trendmaker does not believe that our commitment to safety should end at our door but that we should willingly share our experience & knowledge with others in our industry.

• Contractors: Trendmaker is committed to ensuring that everyone working on our jobsites goes home safely. This includes our partners, our contractors and subcontractors. Though Trendmaker recognizes that ultimately worker safety is the responsibility of the worker, we believe that through education, assistance, and the promotion of accountability, we can assist those at highest risk in our industry. These are some of our programs involving contractors and their workers.
  • We conduct a mandatory safety orientation for all new contractors. One of our two bilingual safety advisors reviews our safety expectations and offers assistance in meeting them.
  • Each year, at each area in Houston, we have a "safety blitz" where our workers are provided with a general safety discussion, free lunch and awarded gift cards based on their ability to answer general safety questions. It is a huge hit with our workers. We also award a crew in each area an award for their safety performance in front of the other workers so that they see that commitment to safety is rewarded by our company.
  • Safety performance on our jobsites is monitored daily by our superintendents and our two bilingual safety advisors. We use the results of these evaluations to either correct deficiencies, hold on site safety awareness meetings, or reward those that show their commitment to safety.
  • Whenever a new section or community opens, all contractors and suppliers for that community are required to attend a "community kickoff meeting" here at our corporate office where our safety and company expectations are reviewed.
  • Each quarter a new safety focus topic is promoted based on incident trends. This topic is posted at our homes under construction in both English and Spanish and our employees use it to emphasize that topic throughout the quarter.
• Building partners: We also do our best to promote safety among our building partners in the communities we develop. Each quarter all superintendents, both Trendmaker's, and our building partner's, meet to discuss safety issues and offer suggestions for improvement. Community wide we are promoting housekeeping and hard hats in an attempt to take the first steps toward persuading other companies in our industry of the importance of safety.

Because of our commitment to promote our safety culture both within our company and with others in our industry, we believe we meet the qualifications for the Henshaw Award for Corporate Leadership in Safety.