There’s a reason Geneva Rock talks so often about sending every team member home safe at the end of the day. Safety matters on the job, but what happens after the shift is what makes it personal.
Ryan Hymas, safety manager over Geneva Rock’s equipment division, thinks about that every time he pulls into his driveway.
“I’ve got an 11-year-old son who, every single day I pull into my driveway, has his baseball glove and my baseball glove, and he’s wanting to play catch,” Hymas said. “He’d be quite disappointed if I came home one day and was unable to do that.”
For Hymas, knowing why he needs to go home safe changes the way he approaches the work.
“We just need to understand why we need to go home safe every day,” he said. “I love that we’re seeing more and more a culture that’s shifting toward people understanding that and really taking it seriously.”
That culture depends on people being willing to slow down and think through the work. Hymas said one of the most common lessons after an incident is that there was an opportunity to take more time.
“I have never dealt with an incident here or outside of here where we weren’t able to say we could have taken a little bit longer,” Hymas said. “We could have thought that process through just a little bit more before we took action.”
That idea connects closely with Geneva Rock’s W.I.N. methodology, which asks a simple question: “What’s important now?” When something changes or the pressure starts to build, W.I.N. helps bring the focus back to what matters most in that moment.
For Brandon Burt, a supervisor at Geneva Rock, safety starts with knowing his team and paying attention to the people around him.
“Every day when we come to work, I’m worrying about everybody here, wanting them to go home with their family,” Burt said. “The best thing about the team is if they see something, they’ll say something.”
Burt also uses daily huddles as a chance to see how people are doing, not just what work needs to get done.
“You can see if they’re tired or if they’re just having a bad day, or if something feels off with that person,” Burt said. “You can pull them to the side and say, ‘Hey, are you okay today?’”
That awareness is part of the larger culture Jess Anderson, director of safety at Geneva Rock, wants to see continue to grow.
“What is so hard to understand is the total impact when it comes to safety and building a culture of a company,” Anderson said. “It’s so people can go home safe, but also so we as a company can thrive and be successful.”
For Anderson, those two things are closely connected. Taking care of people is not separate from Geneva Rock’s ability to do good work. It’s part of it.
“Ultimately, it’s whatever we can do to make our team successful and to go home safe every single day, every team member,” he said. “We take that serious and we take it personal.”
Anderson said he has also seen that commitment supported throughout Geneva Rock’s leadership.
“I’ve been very impressed with the support from the top down, caring about our people and our team members, knowing where the work happens and knowing how important it is to keep them safe,” he said.
That support matters, but safety still comes down to the decisions people make in the moment. It’s the supervisor who notices that someone seems off. It’s the team member who speaks up when something does not look right. It’s the person who slows down long enough to ask, “What’s important now?”
And sometimes, the reason for making the safe choice is waiting in the driveway with a baseball glove.