Davey Tree Flipbooks

4 THE DAVEY BULLETIN | May/June 2024 complexity accordingly. That starts with modernizing the infrastructure around our health and safety team to allow for growth, without interrupting the services they currently provide for our field employees. We are a much more service-diverse company than many other firms in the green industry. We aren't just a tree care company. In the past 10 years, we have had to define safety standard operating procedures for crews working on mulching and wood-waste handling sites, operating railroad equipment, mitigating streams and wetlands, operating drones, and other unique work situations, in addition to our core tree care, commercial grounds, and utility operations. Late last year, we merged our regional skills trainers, from within the Davey Institute, and our regional safety specialists, from within the health and safety department, to create one, unified team. This union allows us to better leverage the geographic coverage of these teams to ensure we are optimizing the leadership and expertise of these professionals. Uniting these two teams provides additional insight into training and education for the safety specialists while expanding the safety procedures and compliance knowledge base for the skills trainers. Don Roppolo, vice president, health and safety operations support, has been coordinating that effort, which underscores the value of training and education to increase the safety of our employees. That approach is aligned with the evolving philosophy in the safety profession that preventive measures such as refining systems and procedures, maintaining clear communication, and increasing employees' expertise can be more effective in preventing incidents than a reactive or punitive approach. While we continue to emphasize individual and team accountability, we strive to collaborate with operations to enhance our overall health and safety performance. What all this means for our field employees is that they will continue to see more of an emphasis on an up-front, proactive strategy to prevent safety incidents. Our crews also are going to see a different approach from our safety specialists and skills trainers in the ways we reward, record, A. As our company continues to grow and expand into different service offerings with varying safety needs and challenges, Davey management is actively engaged in meaningful and thoughtful changes to the way we view and support our field personnel in the area of health and safety. Our objective is to create an organization and programs that reflect our future scale and array of services, while incorporating the most advanced safety best practices, all in the effort to ensure that every employee and client is provided the safest environment possible where Davey is involved. Currently, we are in the process of transitioning our health and safety organization and philosophy to better align with operations in support of our Vision 2030 Strategic Plan Objective, which is to make Davey a great place to work while delivering client and shareholder value. The process changes we are implementing are commonly understood and accepted as safety best management practices, not just in the green industry, but in the global occupational safety and health arena. The enhancements we are making to our approach to health and safety revolve around tracking and reporting key safety metrics, such as leading and lagging indicators, and emphasizing proactive measures while streamlining corrective actions and dedicating additional resources to support the compliance, data and communication management, education and training, and logistics operations of the health and safety department. The organizational changes to our health and safety operations are focused on rightsizing and expanding the services our safety personnel provide to the organization, reducing geographic and logistical inefficiencies, and optimizing the skillsets of our safety and training professionals. These strategic initiatives are also intended to address the fact that we are currently a $1.7 billion company, with more than 12,000 employees working in hundreds of diverse operations across North America, with the likelihood that our company will double in size within the next 10 years. With this as our future, we need the health and safety organization to be flexible and robust, with the ability to adapt to the projected business scale and Q. HOW IS HEALTH AND SAFETY AT DAVEY CHANGING? ASK THE CEO Pat Covey Davey Chairman, President and CEO

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