Quality + Safety: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Here at L. Keeley, Quality and Safety go hand in hand and are at the heart of everything we do. Providing the highest quality work while ensuring the safety of our people and our partners is our number one priority. Recently, Matt Muller, Director of Quality, and Rob Miller, Director of Safety got together to discuss the importance of Quality and Safety and how they work in tandem to help our teams exceed expectations on every job.

“If I walk up to jobsite, scan around, and see that it’s a safe project, it’s a really good leading indicator that it’s a quality jobsite as well because you can’t have one without the other.”

-Matt Muller, Director of Quality

“It’s all about performance. If we want to perform well, we can’t do that with high quality and no safety, or great safety and poor quality. It’s about the overall high safety, high quality performance.”

-Rob Miller, Director of Safety

Everyone on our jobsites – from leadership to partners to subcontractors– are the main reason for our success. They are the ones onsite everyday working hard to ensure our projects run smoothly and safely. Our people care - they care about each other and about our partners. When you care about their safety, you care about quality. Every decision that is made has an effect on something else. Ensuring that our people are educated and empowered to make safe, quality decisions allows us to continue to give our people the opportunities that they need to grow.

“It’s all about the decisions we make. If you want to provide a high-quality, safe service or product, you’re going to make good decisions along the way.”

One of the many processes that L. Keeley has in place to promote quality and safety is HPI, or Human Performance Improvement, and it is equally as important to quality as it is to safety. Our teams have worked hard to establish systems that promote safety and guide our team members forward after an error occurs. Errors are unavoidable, it is in our nature as human beings.

However, the most important thing is how we assess those errors, learn from them, and move forward. Our HPI process allows us to ensure that the systems we have in place will absorb whatever error occurs without a negative impact.

“Construction is tens of thousands, possibly millions of pieces, put together by hundreds of people in a dynamic environment.”

Safety truly is our number one priority. Our safety culture empowers our people to call out actions if they feel unsafe and work hard to get themselves and each other home safe at the end of every day. At L. Keeley we all have our own “My Why”, which is our individual mission for why we choose to be safe every day. It is also an understanding that when we make decisions, there are things bigger than us that our decisions can potentially impact.

“The decisions I make cannot be based on comfort, ease, and speed, which is how we are designed. They have to be based on something bigger than myself…and if we can educate people on ensuring that those decisions they are making need to be made more thoughtfully and not automatically, we can ensure that it is going to be a high-quality, safe day.”

We work hard to be a quality resource to Keeley’ns so when they make those thoughtful decisions, they have a support network behind them.

Our world-class culture at L. Keeley guides everything that we do. It is our common system of beliefs and values.

“We at Keeley have a culture, and safety, quality, and family are a part of that culture. It’s a part of what makes us who we are…It all starts with us caring about each other.”

From the top down, we work hard to spread this culture to our sub-partners and customers. They are part of our Keeley family and we want to provide them with a quality product while keeping every single person safe.

“I’ve heard personally from so many subcontractors that they appreciate…that we aren’t telling them how to do their job, but we are telling them what we expect from safety and quality. It’s so empowering to hear from our Keeley’ns, but even more so from people outside that they see that benefit and are immersing themselves in our culture.”

Click here to learn more about KeeleySafe. Click here to learn more about how you can establish your own culture of quality.