Welcome to Hile Group

Safety excellence pays in both intangible and quantifiable ways, from improvement in employee morale to better bottom-line results. For Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, the push to improve safety also had a key competitive component: More and more, key customers in the marine industry were insisting on making safety performance a criterion for awarding contracts.

GLDD started out with a typically aggressive effort using standard safety improvement tactics used by a major consulting firm, and they did start getting results. But by 2005-2006, they saw they had hit a plateau. The low-hanging fruit was gone, and the standard approach could not reach the harder-to-define issues.

It was at that point that the Hile Group came in, and began working at the deeper organizational performance issues that affected how people did their jobs and led the company. Through Hile Group's work with all levels of the organization and one-on-one efforts with key leaders, GLDD was re-energized and the numbers began to fall again. By 2009, GLDD was thriving, even in a tightly competitive market and weak economy, and known throughout the industry as a safety leader.