Construction workers don’t always recognize all hazards present on the jobsite, and when they do, not everyone calls them the same thing.
During pre-job safety meetings, construction workers identify only 45% of the hazards they face, according to the Construction Safety Research Alliance. Meanwhile, Construction Safety Week’s executive team found that when craft workers may recognize dangers, the specific terminology varies greatly from jobsite to jobsite.
So, the executive team has issued a proposal to fix that: Standardize the language.
Safety Week’s executive team proposed uniting the construction industry to adopt and recognize the terms “high hazard,” “high energy” and “STCKY” — or stuff that can kill you. The three classifications of the biggest jobsite dangers differ slightly, but still function as the most consistent identifiers or precursors of serious injuries and fatalities, also called SIFs.
The Safety Week executive team found the factors that cause SIFs differ from those that lead to more minor injuries. Therefore, the group called upon all stages of the industry to adopt the same framework of safety terminology to better protect workers from the most life threatening dangers.
Adam Jelen, CEO of Gilbane Building Co. and chair of the Construction Safety Week executive committee, told Construction Dive that the organization sought to simplify jobsite language and reduce gaps in recognition for workers across jobsites.
The language of safety
Most of the vocabulary is not new. OSHA’s Focus Four have been well documented as the leading causes of death and injury in construction. Meanwhile, Tempe, Arizona-based Sundt Construction’s piloting of its STCKY program won a national innovation award from the Associated General Contractors of America.
But the Safety Week team’s proposal seeks to dig a little deeper by bringing all of the language under one roof and outlining the nuance between them. For example, a flow chart in the resource bulletin shows the “Energy Wheel,” which identifies several kinds of hazards on site, including gravity, motion and sound. Another wheel for STCKY describes similar hazards as work at height, moves and work environment.
Courtesy of Construction Safety Week
The classification seeks to create an instant visual side-by-side for teams to identify any dangers on site or ahead of time.
Planning ahead for safety
In practice, many major players in construction have had some version of identifying the jobsite dangers most likely to lead to SIFs. Increasingly, that’s done early on.
For years, safety planning began in the preconstruction phase, said Hal Wheatley, corporate safety director for Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Manhattan Construction. Now, it’s moved into the project pursuit phase.
“Usually we know, okay, we’re going to have a jobsite here, let’s go visit the site and identify the scope of work. We’re going to have steel erection, we’re going to have excavation. Let’s start the conversation months in advance,” Wheatley told Construction Dive. “It’s a lot easier to mitigate a hazard earlier in the process than it is, say, if you try to mitigate it the day before work starts.”
Steve Spaulding, senior vice president and chief environmental health and safety officer for Turner Construction, says the New York City-based builder looks at the original work plans and identifies behaviors that can create the right or wrong safety environment.
“What we’re really trying to look at is the behaviors that allow for life threatening injuries on the jobsite, or any type of hazard that can be controlled that would prevent an injury,” said Spaulding.
Both Spaulding and Wheatley said they often try to find ways around even having hazards present by shifting work in scheduling or bringing prevention into the design process.
Sometimes, though, hazards are unavoidable. When that’s the case, firms work the problem. For example, with a hazard like working at height, Turner ensures employees know the environment itself represents a high energy hazard — one of those most likely to result in a SIF. It’s a matter of education that goes well beyond providing the proper safety equipment and ensuring it’s worn, Spaulding said.
“What we see a lot of the time is that the planning says, ‘Hey, you got a fall hazard, make sure you’re tied off.’ And we want to make sure that that planning is ‘What is the anchorage point?’” he said. “It’s not that you’re tied off, it’s that you’re tied off to the right anchorage point.”
Safety ownership across leadership
The executive team for Safety Week is full of C-suite executives from major contractors looking to lead from the front.
Jesse Torres, corporate compliance safety director for Granite Construction and part of the Safety Week technical committee, said the higher-ups at his firm take charge of safety. They identify STCKY and potential SIFs early on and incorporate that into project planning to mitigate the concern before boots touch the jobsite.
“It comes from the leadership of each organization. It comes through engineering, pre-construction services, before it even gets down to the skilled craft, with the frontline supervisor,” Torres said. “Because by that point it should be eliminated or engineered out. It’s the last checkpoint.”
At the same time, Shaun Carvalho, chief safety officer for Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, said the approach should not be entirely top down. Shawmut works to incorporate the craft workers and physical jobsite presence in the planning process to inform them of the hazards and contribute to safety management.
“If they’re part of the task to deliver the task, the operation, they need to be part of creating that plan,” Carvalho said.
