Being safer every day
Safety is the top priority in every built environment project, and to mark the World Day for Safety and Health at Work Andy Peters, AECOM’s global lead for health and safety, assesses how the construction industry is performing
No matter where you work in the world, safety is top of mind in the construction industry. There has been huge progress over the past century to ensure the safety of all workers at every stage of a project. It’s a great success story.
However, there are still instances where accidents happen. The U.S. Construction Industry Institute’s latest report, “Improving Site Safety Performance through Operational Excellence” indicates rate of improvement among industry leaders has slowed down. This needs to be addressed, and work is under way to spread this awareness, and educate staff on what they can do to mitigate future risk.
Addressing challenges in the U.S.
Accountability and training is key. In my former career as a miner, I was required to complete 40 hours of safety orientation at a local university before even entering the mine. And following that, you had to have three years of experience with a college degree to become a mine inspector, plus a series of further extensive training sessions and examinations as your career progressed.
This is not the norm across the industry. By adding stricter laws and regulation, competent supervision could be strengthened in the U.S. Using the right training and tools, we need to get passionate about going beyond what companies require of their employees in these roles.
For example, the construction industries in the U.K., Ireland and Australia are highly performance driven and safety guidance is written in a way where failure to comply can result in significant penalties. It is no coincidence that the highest performing places in the world have the most stringent safety regulations and strongest accountability for implementing the regulations.
That’s why I think that in the U.S. there should be regulations related in all industries for supervisors to have a formal knowledge of the law and a certification that they passed an examination validating their knowledge.
The AECOM way
Safety excellence is crucial to our operations at AECOM, both in the ways we run our own offices and how we manage and work on project sites.
For every job, we bring an integrated safety management system with a set of procedures that comprehensively address hazards and risk. In 2016, AECOM’s global recordable incident rate was one-tenth of the current U.S. construction industry average. Our employees are trained to identify and understand risks and how to mitigate them. We add in specific processes, such as hazard assessment, for detailed analysis of risks, and develop individual and group work plans every day to mitigate the hazards associated with their work.
Our culture of caring means that supervisors check on our employees throughout the day to ensure they are following the plan and if they need any assistance.
Our tools include a third-party software called LifeGuard, an excellent employee observation tool that has an impact on human factors where senior managers can make observations on the office and field work environment. Using LifeGuard, our employees can identify unsafe conditions and potential hazards on projects and immediately alert contractors working onsite of the condition so they can correct it. We enable our employees to participate and be individually responsible for ensuring their health and safety and that of others.
We utilize another tool called IndustrySafe that allows us to run trend analysis from a global basis on all of the incidents that are reported through our industry safe system. This allows our employees to identify near misses and report first aids, recordable injuries and lost time work cases, and our processes for investigation kick in, having executive and senior leadership participation and incident reviews. These are just some of the things that separate us from the competition.
Safer futures together
The successful formula to achieve world class safety is for leadership, in professional services firms and client organizations, to be highly involved in the safety process and to continually demonstrate their commitment to safety. Combining this with employee engagement creates a working environment which supports proactive and positive attitudes towards safety and eliminating hazards. We believe the best safety systems are management driven and employee owned. This approach is critical to reducing the frequency and severity of incidents and enables us all to become safer at work.