Lee Industrial Contracting Helps Enrich Safety Culture with EMU Great Lakes OSHA Education Center

Eastern Michigan University

August 19, 2024

https://www.emich.edu/ppat/news/lee-industrial-contracting-enrich-safety-culture.php

The Background — Industrial-Sized Safety

Lee Industrial Contracting is an industrial contracting firm based in Pontiac, Michigan since 1989. With 30+ years delivering turn-key industrial contracting services, we have wide ranging expertise in a variety of markets, including: aerospace, automotive, energy, food/beverage, pharmaceutical, chemical, environmental and heavy industry. Lee Contracting employs over 550 workers from all manner of trades for a wide variety of industries.

“We can basically do anything for you. We do a lot of work with the Big 3 [automotive companies] for machine maintenance but we can also build a brand-new office building,” explains Dennis Mosher, Director of Safety and Security for the company.

From Amazon to Tesla, to Kellogg’s to the Detroit Zoo, Lee Industrial Contracting provides over 14 different trade capabilities for nearly every industry imaginable, calling itself the only single-source industrial general contractor.

Of course, with that many Lee workers in various industries humming around the United States, Dennis and Andy Barnum, the Director of Training and Development, need to ensure every single one is properly trained and comes home safely.

Our Solution — EMU Professional Programs & Training (PPAT) Health & Safety Arrives at Lee Industrial

“I worked with EMU in a limited scope with my previous organization and one of their phenomenal instructors, Carl Woodward, taught a lead and asbestos course,” Andy recalls. “He did such an incredible job and was such a thorough subject matter expert that I knew when we needed training here I would reach back out to Carl and Beth [Stoner, Director of Great Lakes OSHA Education Center] at EMU and continue that relationship.”

After arriving at Lee Industrial, Andy contacted Beth and quickly realized how vast EMU PPAT’s Health and Safety offerings were and began planning to implement more training at Lee.

“Beth has been so great to work with for so long that I’m super comfortable shooting an email or picking up the phone,” says Andy.

When Lee Industrial was awarded the Going PRO Talent Fund, a grant from the State of Michigan to “assist in training, developing, and retaining current and newly hired employees”, Andy knew safety training needed to be a huge part of that.

“Anytime you work with a grant, you have to be good stewards of the State’s money, and with that comes a lot of responsibility. That’s what’s so great about working with such a reputable organization like EMU and Great Lakes OSHA. They’re so well established and have such a high reputation that getting approved for those courses is very easy. The State of Michigan knows that they’re going to get quality training.”

Part of the quality training comes from EMU instructors’ ability to translate complex health and safety lessons into easily understandable real-life examples.

“We’ve partnered with other training organizations that are great at checking the box of complying with OSHA standards,” Andy explains. “The trainers at EMU have decades of experience and they don’t just teach out of a textbook, they interpret OSHA standards in a way that makes sense and uses real-life experience. They’re in the trenches.”

Lee Industrial employees were enrolled in occupational safety, health and compliance training including courses such as lead and asbestos, confined space, fall protection, and OSHA incident investigation. The EMU instructors were deployed on-site to the Lee headquarters and the West Michigan arm of Lee Industrial in Walker, Michigan. For the team at Lee Industrial, on-site training has been a big success.

“Any time we’re doing in-person training it generates real-life discussion,” says Dennis. “You can bring up timely examples of what you’re working on, and what roadblocks you have, and EMU’s trainers are able to work through that stuff. We brought guys who weren’t even scheduled for a class to come in and seek guidance and EMU has been more than willing to provide it.”

The Results — A Culture of Safety

In the world of safety, no news is good news. That’s been the story at Lee Industrial since investing heavily in safety training. Their workforce has become more empowered to call out safety issues before harm or injury arises.

“We’re trying to build a safety culture here, right? And part of that is providing the guys with the knowledge they need to do their jobs and do their jobs well,” Dennis explains. “With the amount of training we provide and some of that training coming from EMU, it’s really helped reinforce that safety culture. We’re not doing this because we’re checking a box — we’re doing it because we care about you and your family’s well-being…I think that’s really helped shift our culture the past couple of years.”

Since the focus in safety training, Andy and Dennis both attest that more employees are raising their hands to point out safety hazards they learned in training.

“One of the outcomes with programs with true subject matter experts is that it gives our people the confidence to say, ‘Whoa! Wait a minute. Let’s stop working. This is not safe. Let’s call my supervisor, reevaluate, and find a way to do this more safely.’”

A significant portion of Lee Industrial’s workforce has gone through health and safety training under EMU PPAT, with more planned through the end of 2024. The training has helped keep their workforce safe in industries ranging from aerospace to construction, making their safety standards stand out alongside their unique ability to tackle any project. The level of safety at Lee has even resulted in awards, as Dennis and his team recently received a platinum-level award for safety initiatives from the Associated Builders and Contractors Safety Training and Evaluation Process Program.

For more information on building a culture of safety at your workplace and enrolling in EMU PPAT Health and Safety or Great Lakes OSHA Education Center courses, contact us today.