In the contracting world, we see all too often companies that simply just check boxes on safety, quality and paperwork in general. We don’t believe in that. We often see these same contractors underbid jobs and then fail to execute the project safely or with quality. What most aggravates us though is when we see a customer or contractor (both) that do not truly practice a genuine safety culture. They just check boxes.
It’s not uncommon for contractors and customers to mishandle safety issues.
We’ve seen customers fire a good contractor because of a minor incident. Even when the contractor had a great safety culture and fixed the issue for the long term. The customer needed to check the box that it was dealt with.
We’ve seen contractors have a minor incident and get fired because they didn’t actively mitigate the hazard going forward and blew it off.
Both are wrong. Why? Because neither one of them actively sought to mitigate and remove the hazard.
They didn’t do a thorough investigation, bring in experts and look at every possible way to mitigate the hazard.
What’s the best way a to create a genuine safety culture?
- Encourage BBS, near miss and incident reporting – Use this data to trend and mitigate hazards, proactively eliminating them as much as possible.
- Audit and inspect crew and jobsites. Score and evaluate them.
- Preach and practice safety, from the top down.
- Make safety one of your core values, hire and evaluate by it.
- Do not punish for turning in safety. Don’t overburden them with paperwork. If it becomes a headache or immediate punishment, communication is shut down.
Basically, create a culture where crews are comfortable to turn in near miss, BBS and all safety incidents no matter how small. This is where you can proactively learn and look for ways to remove hazards.
Use an employee or contractor led the team to come to solutions for hazards together. The moment that you severely punish or overburden with paperwork, communication slows and you lose this important key step in hazard mitigation. I’ve seen companies fire employees or contractors for this and thus shut down all open communication with their other employees and contractors. This isn’t a safety culture; it’s simply checking boxes. A true safety culture that is successful relies on buy-in, transparency, and constantly evaluating all hazards so they don’t happen again. For every task, we should ask “what if” and then work as a team to remove that hazard. Throw a safety card to start a discussion.
Safety has to be reactive, but it must also be proactive.
Collecting data, learning and asking the right questions together will help remove and reduce the risks.
Lead from the top. Push for everyone to be fully on board with safety. And practice what you preach.
At Lanracorp, we have tremendous safety involvement from our field team by doing the things listed above. Our team is transparent and we proactively look for every hazard and for ways to mitigate them, as a team, together.
That’s a safety culture.
The goal is ZERO.
It’s the Lanracorp way.