Let’s talk about jobsite safety for a minute. Interestingly, if you go back 100 years, safety wasn’t the core value on construction projects like it is today. Why did that change? A cultural shift happened.
Leadership saw the value in safety (likely because they recognized improved safety equaled money saved due to decreased liabilities). It was an interesting topic at a conference I attended about a year ago.
The bottomline is that safety is now a key metric for many organizations and in order for it to be successful a few key factors need to happen: leadership needs to recognize it is a priority and workers need to implement it throughout the project.
This is in line with a report that was released in early February by Dodge Data & Analytics that indicates jobsite workers are a critical part of safety programs. The numbers show four factors are essential aspects of a safety program: jobsite worker involvement; strong safety leadership abilities in supervisors; regular safety meetings with jobsite workers and supervisors; and ongoing access to safety training for supervisors and jobsite workers.
In many cases, construction companies rely on supervisors and foremen to provide the safety training to jobsite workers. Thus, construction companies that want to excel with safety-management programs need to ensure leadership is on board with the initiatives—and it seems this is the case for many.
One example of this is Level 10 Construction, which made some big strides with safety. The company leverages planning, technology, and execution in order to ensure everyone on and near its jobsites are safe at all times. The result? It achieved 6 million work hours with zero lost time and completed its seventh full year with zero lost-time injuries.
There are four main ways it achieves this: safety is a core value from the top down; it hires the best safety managers; it has well-trained superintendents who use technology; and safety is built into every decision and every action at the company from preconstruction through close-out.
Many of you might also remember last year we honored the first Constructech Vision Awards for Safety winners, which recognize a company that has achieved a high-level of safety by leveraging innovative technology. Skiles Group and Turner Industries Group both took home the first annual award for use of technology for job safety processes.
Has your construction company done something innovative with technology in order to improve safety on a project? Did it result in zero lost time? Were there a considerable amount of hours without a safety incident? Tell us about it for this year’s Constructech Vision Awards. The deadline is this Friday, February 28, so make sure to submit your entry soon.
Original Article: https://constructech.com/whats-next-for-jobsite-safety/
