CFC’s Holiday Party Honors Founders Safety Award Winners – And Our Commitment To Each Other
Holiday parties generally bring to mind images of merry revelers dressed to the nines celebrating the season with festive food, drink, and dancing. While every element of that list rings true for CFC’s holiday party, we include a very important addition: celebrating CFC’s ongoing commitment to safety, and to ensuring that all of our people return home safe at the end of each and every workday.
CFC held its annual holiday party at the beautiful Lakewood Country Club on December 2, 2022, celebrating yet another year of safe and successful projects, incredible teamwork, and the amazing CFC people who daily deliver high-quality work to all of our clients. The night featured a delicious dinner, socializing, and dancing. Explains CFC President Pat Smith, “The holiday party is another great opportunity for our team to get together and share some time outside of the workplace where we can discuss matters other than what we might be building at the time. At this event, ‘work’ is a bad word.”
CFC annually makes one exception, however, to the “don’t talk about work” policy: the announcement of the CFC Founders Safety Award. This year, the coveted award – which comes with an $800 cash bonus for each CFC employee on the winning project team – went to the Denargo Market Phase IV team. We were privileged to honor their impressive performance on one of our most exciting and challenging project sites. The highly deserving CFC employees who won this year’s Founders Award included Matt Johnson, Grant Macdonald, Dan Brown, Wyatt Breum, Paul Pruett, Sajid Faiz, Richard Hunt, Nicole Lopez, Rene Beltran, Mike Peterson, Gregorio Sandoval, and Ashleigh Valorz.
The Founders Award, named in honor of CFC Chairman and Founder EJ Olbright, whose commitment to safety continues to underpin all of CFC’s projects, was created and first awarded in 2018. The goal was to inspire CFC’s teams not only to stay focused on everyday safety, but also to find ways to continually improve our processes and protocols to ensure the safest workplace possible. By measuring projects against one another competitively, it also encourages CFC’s teams to learn from and be inspired by other teams’ safety successes. A statue in CFC’s lobby commemorates the award and its theme.
Says Smith, “The winning of the Founders Award is something that is held in high regard here at CFC. It reflects our commitment to safety, and that everybody comes home safe at the end of each day. The competition is always very close, and the winners obtain ‘bragging rights’ for the next 12 months. We see this as winning combination for CFC’s employees, our trade partners, and all the individuals who come in contact with our work.”
To win the award in 2022, project teams received quarterly field visits from a third-party consultant – Chad Olivier from LOM Consulting Services – who scored each of the projects based on his observations over all four visits. The consultant’s observations focused on PPE, fall protection, housekeeping, and other field compliance items. To ensure impartiality in scoring, the consultant’s score accounted for 60% of the overall score weighting. The remaining 40% of the scoring, conducted by CFC Safety Director Shawn Burke, consists solely of the safety documentation project teams should be tracking (e.g., project orientations, safety inspections, safety permits, subcontractor safety manuals). This approach was used to put more emphasis on performance versus documentation, thereby capturing the spirit of safety more fully and accurately. After all, while the documentation provides a crucial foundation for project safety, the project team’s safety performance is the proof that documentation is being followed.
In 2022, CFC’s document review process encompassed approximately 100 items for each project. Third-party field observations included 134 items per project. CFC’s Denargo Market Phase IV project team was ultimately selected as the winner for a variety of reasons, including:
- Zero injuries
- The highest document compliance
- The best observed field compliance
- The best safety attitudes among CFC employees and trade partners
- Excellent housekeeping
Consultant Chad Olivier recounted several ways that the Denargo IV project team stood out for Founders Award consideration. Explained Olivier, “The project exhibited a strong safety culture overall, with attitudes and behaviors such as good housekeeping maintenance and PPE compliance – even when the inspection team wasn’t looking. This team was one of the only projects to document a mock evacuation drill, and exhibited evidence of staff inspections on days when Shawn Burke was not present. The team also organized ‘stand downs’ to address concerns.” He continued, “Attention to the safety administration appeared to be delegated to the entire team, and the project leadership showed its active influence.”
Everyone at CFC is proud to honor the Denargo Market Phase IV project team and their spirit of safety. They absolutely exemplify our people’s unwavering commitment to each other, our trade partners, and our clients. We are thankful for all they do everyday, ensuring safety from the smallest details to the biggest undertakings. After all, every successful project is a safe project.
To learn more about CFC’s safety commitment and the values and job site practices that underpin it, check out our website. CFC is also a proud participant in the Associated General Contractors (AGC) of Colorado’s Construction Health and Safety Excellence (CHASE) Partnership. CFC has achieved the highest award level possible annually since 2018.