Canadian Occupational Safety

www.thesafetymag.com/ca 27 Over the last three months, our researchers have interviewed and surveyed thousands of safety professionals across Canada to find out who they recognize as Canada's best safety consultants. We surveyed these safety professionals through Canadian Occupational Safety magazine and through the organization Threads of Life, asking them who they believe to be the best safety consultants in Canada. Participants rated safety consultants across a range of criteria, asking them to assign numerical scores to the companies' performance. A shortlist was created based on the collated results of 1,800 votes from safety professionals across the country. In addition to surveys, our research team conducted in-depth interviews with safety professionals in Canadian companies and safety advisors. Based on the importance of each criteria, an algorithm was applied to determine the star rating for safety consultants. The top-ranking consultants were awarded five-star ratings. Where companies rated highly enough to achieve an 80-per- cent-or-above approval rating, they were awarded a five-star rating in the relevant criteria/area. To determine the ratings, our analysts gave a weighting to each criterion, depending on its relative importance for customers (for example, if customer service was ranked as the most important criteria for customers, then customer service was weighted more heavily than other criteria, such as meeting requirements). Our analysts applied an algorithm to the data to reflect the weighting and importance of each criteria. METHODOLOGY TWENTY-TWENTY was a watershed year for the occupational health and safety profession. As with almost all sectors, it has been affected in a multitude of ways. And it is a trend that we have seen across all industries, notably highly affected areas such as construction, manufacturing and health care, which have long been the domain of safety consultants and OHS specialists at large. Although many workers have shifted to working from home, a number of essential workers are still operating on the frontlines. In fact, many workplace safety specialists have been working on the frontlines for more than a year now. "The pandemic has created significant health and safety challenges. We feel particularly privileged to help organizations continue to protect their people and create safer workplaces amidst these challenges," says Greg Thomson, CEO of winning organization Occupational Safety Group (OSG). Although health and safety professionals have had to deal with epidemics before — many safety pros cut their teeth on the SARS outbreak in 2002 — the scale of these challenges has been unprecedented. And so, the big question for safety consultants was, according to Wes Mazur, president of winning organization Spark Safety Solutions, "how do we actually advise employers and help them through something that none of us have experienced before?" A changing role One thing that safety consultants all agree on is that the pandemic has impacted their role. The specialists we spoke to say that the demands of their clients have been numerous and sometimes different to what they have been used to. "It think [the pandemic] has increased [our role] tenfold," says Andrea Crittenden, president and CEO of Sixteen Safety Services, Inc., another winner. "This is definitely something that would be placed on the safety plate… It just adds to our very valuable and long list of items that are part of our job description and part of our person. It goes hand in hand," says Crittenden. In some ways, the profession has not changed at all, given that the aim of workplace safety specialists has always been safeguarding employees against any and all threats. In other ways, of course, the profession has shifted "[The pandemic] has, in many ways, forced safety consultants or safety professionals to think outside the box — even more than what we thought the box looked like." Wes Mazur, Spark Safety Solutions S a f e t y C o n s u l t a n t

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