Using Technology to Improve Safety on Construction Sites

Construction sites can be dangerous places. This isn't news to anyone who has walked through a jobsite or reviewed incident rates for the industry. This should not, however, automatically equate to an unsafe workplace.

A construction contractor's safety goal is to manage risk across a diverse work force while acknowledging the potential for devastating consequences. Unlike a fixed facility in general industry, each construction project is independent and unique, and projects often are managed by a central office that could be hundreds of miles away. In addition, the work force at each site is bid out and many of the workers or foremen have never worked with the general contractor.

At times, it seems as if companies have to recreate the proverbial wheel to ensure all of the required safety policies and procedures are instituted and enforced. There are systems available that can help manage this process using the power of technology and predictive analytics to provide actionable information from the field to manage jobsite risk.

RECORDING SAFETY INSPECTIONS

When using technology to record safety inspections, safety professionals remotely can access inspections housed in another location, such as a headquarters office. They also quickly and effectively can determine the observational patterns of a given individual, project, region or company, and then extrapolate against those patterns to predict future injuries and incidents. Multiple filters can be applied for the data, such as project/location and crew/contractor, as well as the individual inspector. Technology also allows safety professionals to track observations by specific conditions or behaviors.

Most companies have a process to record safety inspections. The challenge is managing the findings so companies can track and trend the data over time. The typical approach is to use paper cards or checklists to capture only unsafe observations. The observed issue then is fixed and the hard copy inspection is filed away in a file cabinet or a homegrown database, never to be seen or used again. This is referred to as the “whack-a-mole” approach. It is better than not doing any inspection at all, but a safety inspection process should be more robust in order for it to be truly effective.

Risk management involves analyzing exposures and then determining how to best handle at-risk behaviors and conditions. The best way to accomplish this is to have a comprehensive inspection strategy. When supported by a robust technology solution, this strategy takes into account at-risk conditions and behaviors across time, allowing for historical comparisons — a method to track progress on long-term corrective actions — as well as predict when future injuries and incidents will occur.

According to OSHA, a comprehensive inspection strategy entails a documented system for routinely scheduled self inspections of the workplace. This documented system includes a tool or checklist, an inspection schedule, hazard identification training, recording of findings, determination of responsibility for abatement and hazard tracking for timely correction.

RECORDING DETAILED OBSERVATIONS

Safety professionals who use technology to record detailed observations can benchmark leading metrics internally and externally, and measure where observations occur — not just by location, but also regarding who and what was observed. They also can measure and systemically improve the quality of the inspectors.

When recording findings, it is just as important to collect and record findings from safe observations as it is to record unsafe observations. Compliance officers typically have a saying: “If it is not documented, then it didn't happen.”

Imagine a worksite manager being cited for failure to have a fire extinguisher adjacent to hot work activity such as welding. The manager argues that inspectors look at this daily and have never found any issues. However, a lack of unsafe observations does not indicate there were observations of this activity. Recording safe observations creates documentation of a company's productivity in relation to performing work safely.