Haller Enterprises, Inc. is a 40-year-old residential and commercial HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contracting company serving residential and commercial new construction and service markets. Based in Lititz, PA, the company employs around 350 people in five branch locations around the state.

With that many employees and customers, our mission is to keep them all safe and healthy. That is a big mission.

From its start by Rick Haller back in 1981, the company developed seven core values, and safety was among them. We’re anchored by our values and driven by our vision for a better service experience.

Haller's safety culture is one of Eddie McFarlane's responsibilities
Eddie McFarlane is Vice President of Learning and Development

Why is Safety So Important?

Customer safety is always at the forefront of our minds on every job, and with the pandemic, we leaned in to be sure we were as safe as possible when working at customer’s homes. Safety included wearing full personal protective equipment (PPE), sanitizing all tools and equipment, and daily covid protocols for technicians. We view our jobs as keeping our customers safe, whether by providing them clean air by replacing an air filter or fixing an electrical issue in a panel.

Our #1 priority is to make sure our teams go home safely every night. To that end, we regularly hold training to help improve job site safety.

Safety becomes paramount during the busy seasons. We’ve noticed over the years that when things get busy, there tend to be more injuries. Many such injuries are caused by technicians working too quickly to finish jobs and move on to the next one.

Dwayne Stauffer is credited with creating Haller's safety culture
Dwayne Stauffer is the
Safety and Risk Control Manager

Your company and your techs must keep everyone in the game during the busy season. This is the time to communicate the importance of safety more often; remind the techs to slow down and ask for help if they don’t think they can do something safely.

Creating A Safety Culture

Haller’s approach to safety begins by creating safety policies through what we call our Safety Committee. The committee consists of people who work in the field, do the work, and face safety considerations every day.

Once the committee develops safety policies, we take it from there and start driving those home, focusing on the areas where we see the most difficulty.

Here are some bullet points on how we develop and maintain a safety culture at Haller:

  • Safety is all about good communication, keeping it up front, and part of your daily safety routine. We talk about it in our daily huddles. We talk about it in our one-on-one conversations.
  • Evaluations. Everyone is evaluated on safety at their quarterly one-on-one meetings including management. We talk about difficulties and wins at monthly department meetings.
  • No-Blame. We have what we call a no-blame autopsy process where everyone in the room is equal. There are no ranks recognized here. Everybody discusses what happened during the incident. Sometimes, depending on the type of event, we might go to the site to see where it happened. We examine the event triggers and talk about the consequences of decisions that could have caused it.
  • Training. Like anything else, safety requires training and practice to make it work in any company. Most companies partner with third-party organizations to help with safety training. In Haller’s case, we partner with several – including National Comfort Institute (NCI).

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