AWARDS ANNOUNCED AT 2024 LEADERSHIP MEETING

Western States recently hosted this year’s, Leadership Meeting. During the meeting, we got the opportunity to highlight some of our employees who have been doing an impeccable job at showing safety skills as well as branches who have excelled in product support, parts, and service. 

The two winners of the Executive Safety Leadership Award were chosen after being nominated by their peers for their representation of our core safety values here at Western States. Dallas Frei and Eric Mai have integrated safety into their daily lives both on and off the clock.  

• Dallas Frei was the inspiration behind the 2023 Gator Bites campaign, regarding the hazard recognition tool we used as a visual emphasis to help employees identify potentially dangerous situations. During the 2022 Gator Bites campaign, Dallas set the mini-gator on top of safety hazards as he submitted the Gator Sightings to Safety. This inspired Western States to expand on opportunities to apply fun and unique approaches to hazard recognition. Dallas’s idea helped boost employee involvement and engagement with the campaign, while also having fun. There is no way we can calculate how many incidents were prevented, but there is no doubt that many were. 
• Eric Mai has consistently lived our core value of safety for nearly 30 years here at Western States. Last year, Eric was driving to a job site and saw a car pulled over on the side of the road with a man kneeling next to it. Bystanders drove by assuming that the man was working on his car however, Eric, with his keen observation skills and strong gut instinct turned around to ensure the man was okay. Eric’s gut instinct was correct because the man was experiencing a medical emergency. He stayed with the man and called emergency services. His strong questioning mindset and quick action proved his attentiveness to our core value of safety and made sure a stranger was able to get the help they needed. 

Our two Executive Safety Leadership Award winners are great examples for everyone at Western States to look up to. Safety is everyone’s number one priority and we appreciate these two gentlemen for being such great leaders in this field. 

Next, Western States awarded their first annual Product Support Excellence Awards. This was the culmination of our product support, parts, and service scorecards for the 2023 fiscal year. All parts and service departments are measured in many ways and collectively all departments did an amazing job in the race for “the best”. Throughout the year we track “points gained” on the scorecards for parts, service, and product support as a whole. The winners for this year by category are:

• Parts Excellence – Missoula Branch 
• Service Excellence – Twin Falls Branch 
• Combined Parts and Service – Missoula Branch 

Overall, we are proud to celebrate so many of our amazing employees at Western States and are already looking forward to celebrating even more next year.