The Ontario Construction Report – DECEMBER 2013 – PAGE OCR B7
Cruickshank achieves “level best” with enviable
safety, innovation and employee engagement
STAFF WRITER – The Ontario Construction Report Special Feature
Cruickshank has been named one of Canada’s safest employers in 2013.
The company received a national gold award on October 30th at a gala in
Toronto. Cruickshank has lived by the company motto “we do our level best” since
1956 – driving ingenuity in road, bridge and infrastructure construction serv-
ices with an engaged team and leading edge tools to get the job right – every
time. Founder Les Cruickshank started the Kingston-based business as a con-
tractor on the St. Lawrence Seaway project. His son Steve, now the com-
pany’s CEO, says his father always had a philosophy of providing great
quality, doing better than industry standards and always bringing an extra
touch to what he did.
After working on the Seaway, Les started road building. “My grandfather
helped him get into it,” says Steve Cruickshank. “My mom did the books
and my uncle got involved. It was a time of opportunity with more cars in
use after WW II and more road construction. Dad had a plan, watched bigger
companies to see how they worked and began building the company.”
Today, the business has expanded and thrived with branches in Alberta
and Tennessee, with 500 employees and an enviable safety record.
Cruickshank says a lot of the old rules, taught long ago to his father by
his grandfather, are still there and provide the basics on which the company
still runs.
“Safety is number one,” he said. “Ensuring quality delivery is number
two. Number three is getting the job done as quickly as possible, without
compromising numbers one and two.”
Cruickshank says Les has served as chair of the Construction Safety As-
sociation of Ontario (CSAO) and that the company’s focus has always been
on safety – leading rather than following the industry standards.
For example, in Ontario the company followed the standard weekly
safety meeting protocol. Then, as Cruickshank expanded to Alberta, staff
discovered contractors there have daily meetings. These daily meetings are
now scheduled company-wide.
“Making people think about safety daily creates a change in culture,”
Cruickshank said. “It isn’t something they only need to consider once a week
when meetings happen; it’s at the forefront every day.”
Cruickshank says the company’s president, Dave Read, has a dedicated
safety focus and has further elevated the company’s safety efforts. Two years
ago the company began to host an annual safety day. Employees take a break
from regular operations one day each summer and go through a series of
stations, set up in a local arena, learning about various safety aspects and
responsibilities.