Ten years ago, a client told our leadership, “If you had a quality program on par with your safety program, you would be leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors.” We took that to heart and realized that we could apply our behavior-based safety program principals and tools to quality. We appointed new quality leadership and launched our reinvigorated Quality Program in February 2016.
What have we learned and achieved after relaunching our Quality Program 10 years ago? By transitioning from a generally passive program of standard operating procedures, policies, and guidance documents to an intentional program, we began integrating quality into our culture. The program is supported by a diverse cross-functional team that offers a valuable range of perspective and experience while serving as quality champions across the company. Our monthly companywide safety meetings were rebranded as core value meetings and added a monthly presentation from the Quality Program. Today, we steward quality and investigate quality incidents using the behavior-based tools that made our safety program so successful. We continue to learn how to improve our culture of quality and Quality Program at Groundwater & Environmental Services, Inc. and will share some of the successes and lessons learned on this 10-year anniversary of our revitalized Quality Program.
SPEAKER: Rich Evans, PE, Groundwater & Environmental Services, Inc., Senior Vice President of Technical Functions
Rich Evans is Senior Vice President of Technical Functions and has led GES’ Quality Program since 2018. He also provides senior technical support and manages GES’ corporate technical functions team that includes engineering, hydrogeology, air quality, small unmanned aircraft systems, and data management and visualization. He also leads our Emerging Contaminants team and is a member of GES’ corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) team.