When the National Safety Council (NSC) called C&W Services to the stage in Denver on September 16, 2025, it was not to recognize a single project or a one-year improvement. It was to honor a safety culture that spans North America with 14,000 team members, and hundreds of client-controlled environments—many of which operate around the clock in settings where hazards are real, not theoretical.
For the second consecutive year, C&W Services received the NSC’s Corporate Culture of Safety Award, one of the highest honors in the industry. It is reserved for organizations that can demonstrate—not claim—that safety is part of how work is designed, led, and carried out every day.
And this year, the recognition came with scale: 71 additional NSC workplace-level awards earned by C&W Services in 2024.
Those workplace awards came across various environments, including manufacturing plants, R&D facilities, office towers, data centers, logistics hubs, universities, and industrial sites. They came from day-shift operators and night-shift cleaners, from technicians and supervisors, from union teams and salaried leads—people who showed what it looks like when safety is more than merely a talking point.
This achievement belongs to a dedicated workforce of thousands. It reflects countless conversations between managers and frontline workers, more than 40,000 hazards identified and resolved by the people closest to the work, and colleagues returning home safely to their families—shift after shift, day after day.
The Scale Behind the Recognition
To qualify for the Corporate Culture of Safety Award, a company must earn at least 50 NSC workplace awards in the previous calendar year. C&W Services exceeded that requirement by more than 40 percent.
The 71 awards represent both long-term consistency and measurable year-over-year gains:
– Significant Improvement Award (5) – 20%+ reduction in Lost-Time Injuries
– 1 Million Hours Award (1) – One million hours for something to go wrong—and 60 million minutes our teams chose to “do it right, do it safely”
– Superior Safety Performance Award (8) – Ten consecutive years injury-free
– Safety Leadership Award (12) – Five consecutive years injury-free
– Perfect Record Award (20) – Zero OSHA recordables for a full year.
Twenty sites where “nothing (bad) happened” because everything was done right
– Occupational Excellence Achievement Award (12) – Large accounts with exceptionally low incident rates
– Safety Service Award (12) – Recognizing outstanding individual contributions to workplace safety
Each award reflects a site, a team, or an individual whose actions sent someone home safe who might not have been otherwise. That is the fundamental metric behind the number 71.
Awards Don’t Create a Culture—They Reveal One
Numbers alone don’t explain why C&W Services was recognized. The company operates in one of the most distributed, risk-diverse sectors in the facilities industry. Teammates work in client-controlled environments—often in small teams, sometimes in isolation, frequently at night—where risk is real and constant.
The discipline that protects them is grounded in practices that repeat themselves across every account: It begins with leadership that treats safety as a value, not a variable. From the outset of her tenure, CEO Mia Mends made it clear that safety would never sit beside business goals in a balancing act—it would define how the business operates.
It continues with frontline ownership. Last year alone, employees submitted more than 40,000 Good Catches—not because hazards increased, but because workers felt empowered to intervene before risk became injury. Nearly 30,000 safety trainings were completed in 2024, spanning multiple languages, formats, and job types.
Engagement happens face-to-face, not in dashboards. Leaders across the company completed 16,500 CWalks in 2024—structured, engaging conversations on the floor, in the field, and at the point of work. These aren’t inspections. They’re opportunities for managers to positively reinforce safe behaviors and to listen, learn, and act on what they hear. CWalks create accountability that flows in both directions: leaders must be present, and frontline workers know their input matters.
None of these initiatives were created to win awards. The awards arrived because the system works.
The People on Stage—and the People Behind Them
The NSC honor in Denver was accepted by Marc Wendell, VP of Corporate EHS; Director Nicholas Chani; and Manager Erin DeKorte; They accepted the award on behalf of the thousands of technicians, cleaners, mechanics, engineers, supervisors, and service teams whose daily vigilance and judgment make safety real.
As they noted onstage, the recognition did not belong to the people holding the plaque in the ballroom. It belonged to the people who weren’t there—because they were on the job, keeping others safe.
What Happens After You Win
The most vulnerable moment for any safety program is the one that comes after success. Awards can become endpoints instead of checkpoints. That’s why we celebrate these 71 awards not as a finish line, but as proof that a culture of safety is lived—not announced. They make the invisible work of prevention visible. They honor the people whose vigilance prevents incidents that never make headlines. And they remind us that when we prioritize people over everything else, excellence follows.
Safety isn’t what we do. It’s who we are.
Learn more about Safety at C&W Services.
