Measures Your Company Can Take to Improve Upon Safety

Moen

Don Moen

"Employers that make job safety and health a real part of their everyday operations will benefit in the long run."

By Don Moen, ABC of Wisconsin

Every year, more than 1,000 construction workers are killed on the job (average of three deaths per day), and more than two million suffer serious job-related injuries or illnesses. Even one serious workplace injury or illness can have a devastating impact on a small business, including costs associated with higher workers’ compensation premiums, medical expenses, legal fees, replacement worker training, lost productivity, equipment repairs, and lower worker morale – to say nothing of the overwhelming personal impacts.

Employers that make job safety and health a real part of their everyday operations will benefit in the long run. Investing in safety and health now will help you avoid possible losses in the future. A safe business is a sound business.

Traditional approaches are often reactive; that is, problems are addressed only after a worker is injured or becomes sick, a new standard or regulation is published, or an outside inspection finds a problem.

The ABC of WI safety team encourages every workplace to have a safety and health program (system). Through these systems, the safety team will provide resources to help member companies develop safety and health programs and evaluate these programs through STEP’s Safety Management System, a benchmarking and continuous improvement tool.

This is all part of a proactive approach for managing workplace safety and health; recognizing that finding and fixing hazards before they cause injury or illness is a far more effective approach. The recommended practices present a step-by-step approach to implementing a successful safety and health program, built around seven core elements:

  • management leadership
  • worker participation
  • hazard identification and assessment
  • hazard prevention and control
  • education and training
  • program evaluation and improvement
  • communication and coordination for host employers, and contractors

If you are just launching a program, the ABC of WI safety team can begin with a basic set-up, with simple goals to achieve. If you focus on achieving goals, monitoring performance, and evaluating outcomes, your workplace can progress to higher levels of safety and health achievement.

By developing and implementing a total safety and health program through the ABC of WI safety team, members are expressing and documenting good faith and commitment to protecting their workers’ health and safety. Doing so does not usually require additional workers or high costs. You can integrate safety and health into your other business functions through the ABC of WI safety team with modest effort.

The key to a successful safety and health program is to view it as a part of your day-to-day business operations. As members incorporate it into their business cultures, safety and health awareness becomes second nature to you and your workers, leading to a safe and sound business. Every workplace should have a safety and health program that includes management leadership, worker participation, and a systematic approach to finding and fixing hazards.

Regular workplace inspections are an important tool for identifying hazards and fixing them. ABC of WI offers no-cost to low-cost and confidential safety and health services to member companies. Four highly educated construction safety and health professionals from ABC of WI safety team works with employers to identify safety and health hazards in workplaces and how to fix them. The ABC of WI safety team also advises members on how to comply with OSHA standards, train and educate workers, and assist with establishing and improving safety and health programs along with defending members against OSHA citations.

To take advantage of this resource, members just call ABC of WI and safety team will determine the scope of the visit. The visit may focus on a single concern of the member, or it may involve a thorough hazard assessment of the entire company and its operations. Once we have developed an essential safety-program, we can take the next step focusing on developing a world-class safety program to ensure your company stays on the continuous path to safety excellence.

Safety Programs Help Contractors:

  • Prevent workplace injuries and illnesses.
  • Improve compliance with laws and regulations.
  • Reduce costs, including significant reductions in workers’ compensation premiums.
  • Engage
  • Enhance social responsibility goals.
  • Increase productivity and enhance overall business operation.

Until recently, relatively few studies have been conducted on the correlation between the use of measures companies can take to keep workers safe on jobsites – leading indicators and the number of incidents/accidents and injuries that occur – lagging indicators. Thus, to quantify the positive impact of proactive injury and hazard elimination programs on the jobsite, ABC has gathered data from STEP participants in construction and analyzed the aggregated data to determine how safety measures actually improve lagging indicator performance.

From this data we found STEP to be a great safety benchmarking and improvement tool, which you as a member can use to measure your safety programs and policies.  STEP is a key component detailed questionnaire to help you meet your goal of implementing and or enhancing safety programs that reduce jobsite incident rates.  /with the help of STEP, you can apply these ABC’s world-class processes to improve safety performance regardless of company size or type of work and you have the ultimate in safety programs.

The model for a world-class safety program utilizes STEP and contains the following elements:

Leadership commitment

Top management engagement and commitment matters. Employer involvement at the top level of company management produces a 63% reduction in total accidents.

Cultural transformation – new hire safety orientation

New-hire orientations are standard practice throughout the construction industry and are designed to onboard new employees into the culture and sharing policies and procedures of their new employer. This process is normally conducted before an employee sets foot on a jobsite or enters a training program. The onboarding process can take many forms and vary in length, but the most important aspect is introducing a new employee to the culture and norms of the company to indoctrinate each individual and help him/her understand the hows and whys of what a company does and expects of the new employee. Here, senior leadership delivers the introduction of the respective company’s safety culture and core values. This process experiences nearly 50% lower incident rates than companies that limit their orientations to basic safety and health compliance topics.

Best practices and core leading indicators

A leading indicator is a system or process used to identify hazards and eliminate or minimize the condition to prevent injury. ABC STEP focuses on eight best practices/core leading indicators that have the most dramatic impact on safety performance.

  1. Toolbox safety talks – Can you brief employees on safety too much? No matter what you may have heard, there is no negative effect to conducting daily toolbox safety talks – brief, single topic training session of 15 to 30 minutes held on the jobsite for all employees. The less frequently this type of training is conducted, the fewer safety topics are covered and the higher the training indicators.  Companies that conduct daily toolbox talks reduce total accidents by a whopping 85% compared to companies that hold them monthly.
  2. Substance abuse programs – One-third of all incidents on construction jobsites are drug or alcohol-related. Companies having substance abuse programs/policies drug and alcohol testing provisions (as permitted) are 60% safer than those without such a program. In addition, substance abuse testing can be an effective method of incident prevention if used properly.
  3. Safety program performance review – A biannual review of safety program performance by executive leadership — evaluating whether the program is producing expected results and identifying opportunities for improvement — leads to a 59% reduction in total accidents and a 60% reduction in days away from work.
  4. Taking action on trailing indicators – Training personnel to know the meaning and relevance of key safety rates and numbers such as EMR (Experience Modification Rate), TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate), and DART (Days Away, Restricted or Transferred), leads to a 57% reduction in TRIR and a 62% reduction in DART rates.
  5. Employer supervisory safety meetings – Conduction weekly safety meetings with supervisors and distributing minutes for review leads to a 56% reduction in TRIR and a 59% reduction in DART rates.
  6. Use of personal protective equipment – Having a written PPE Policy that is consistently and universally enforced, conducting an annual needs assessment, and continually investing in new equipment leads to a 55% reduction in total accidents.
  7. Pre-planning for jobsite safety – Integrating safety pre-planning into the estimating, bid and pre-mobilization phases of a project leads to a 53% reduction in TRIR and a 54% reduction in DART rates.
  8. Safety program goal setting – Implementing a formal process to annually assess safety program needs and establishing safety goals lead to a 48% reduction in TRIR and a 50% reduction in DART rates.

The STEP Safety Management System provides a clear picture of what world-class safety looks like. Analysis of each of the key components’ scores against lagging indicator performance will continue to provide statistical evidence of how individual elements of a safety program contribute to performance. If you combine this program with the resources developed by ABC, you will be able to identify and develop singular elements of your safety program to take the next step to world-class safety.

As construction industry professionals, we all have a moral obligation to protect ourselves and each other and ensure that anyone who sets foot on our jobsites does so in the safest manner possible. By identifying the elements that lead to improved safety performance, we can achieve our ultimate goal, which is to send every single construction employee home in the same — or better — condition than they arrived, every day.

 Don Moen is HR & Safety Director at ABC of Wisconsin. He can be reached at 608-244-5883. Contact Don or one of the other three safety managers at ABC of Wisconsin is you’re interested in the STEP Management System for ABC members. 
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