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Todd Friis is proud of Clayco’s safety record, but he’s not easily satisfied.
The Chicago one The contractor announced on June 26 an experience modification fee of 0.4. A metric used by insurers to measure company safety, the industry average for EMR is 1.0, and lower than this indicates an above-average safety record, while directly affecting a company’s workers’ compensation rate.
Still, Friis, Clayco’s senior vice president of risk management, acknowledged that safety is a tireless endeavor, especially when it comes to training those new to the trades.
“Safety is like anything else, you have so much going on in your life, if someone doesn’t have the important thing in front of you, it goes to the back of your mind.” Friis said. “So we have to tactfully figure out how to keep the safety pieces, the important stuff in front.”
Here, Friis talks to Construction Dive about defining success, tracking subcontractors, and effective training with declining worker attention spans.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION Immersion: How do you define success when it comes to safety?
TODD FRIES: Well, I’m pretty critical myself, but as a company, representing Clayco, I think at the end of the day we want people to feel safe. period
To me, the ultimate compliment from our own people or clients or subcontractors is when they say, “Well, we’ve been with Claycoor we have worked on one Clayco project, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.” And we hear that quite often. Then I’ll ask for some details, and they say, “You’re really going to do what you say you’re going to do. do.”
Todd Friis
Courtesy of Clayco
We have a specific requirement for gloves, for example, and a helmet requirement and all that pretty basic stuff. While many GCs or other companies say they do, they don’t really get it out of their workers or only do it when it’s convenient. We actually catch people in a good way, not necessarily in a punitive way.
What kind of technology does Clayco use to help with security practices?
Clayco uses drone imagery, BIM 360, ACC Build and our Work-Safe app to help with safety practices. The Work-Safe app is a digital safety documentation platform that Clayco has built in-house with our IT development team.
Launching in March 2022 and available on phones, tablets and computers, the platform replaces traditional paper forms used in the field, making security documentation easier for our employees and business partners, while helping us collect and quantify data. Data helps us identify best practices and potential issues.
The Work-Safe app currently supports:
- Worker/subcontractor profile management through an online form that subcontractors fill out when starting a project that includes emergency contacts and training certifications. This information can travel with workers from one project to another, avoiding the need to fill out new forms and start from scratch with each new task. This information can also be managed by the project team.
- Boots in the Field Safety Observation – This involves documenting observations of behavior on site during the workday on a consistent basis, identifying best practices and potential issues.
- Incident reports allow us to collect incident information from the field in a consistent manner that helps us quantify/identify trends that shape our security program.
- Access to documents so users can search our system for programs and written security forms from anywhere.
At Clayco, we determine the best technology to use by constantly innovating when we see a need and keeping up with industry best practices.
What methods do you use to ensure that security requirements are not met only when it is convenient?
It starts with the pre-planning selection of our subcontractors. We prequalify all our subcontractors. So getting the right subcontractors on board at the outset is very important. And hiring our own people, obviously, as well, making sure they understand that when you work at Clayco, safety is definitely the most important thing. Then, when they arrive at the project, also knowing contractually that they will be responsible for these safety features.
And we’ll also recognize people for doing things well and doing them the right way. Our approach is more about training, teaching and recognizing people for doing things right. Because we can’t get everyone out without projects. We need people, we want them to learn. We want them to be better and safer. And this is the only way to do it.
How do you make the most of this time by investing in training and planning, especially for people new to construction?
We believe that more time is needed for new people in the industry. In our case, since 95% of the work is done by subcontractors, we rely on them a lot. And if they are a union company, the union should provide much of the training. So that covers a lot.
But we still see a lot of people coming to our projects who don’t have any experience. They just don’t know how to use hand tools properly. So we spend more time with these people. We talk about it, but in a quick way, because we really don’t have a lot of time when we bring people together through our orientations. Again, I’m talking specifically about subcontractors now. We are trying to get your attention quickly. And these days, it’s really hard to get people’s attention.
I know my attention span is different than it was 10 years ago. If you don’t grab people right away, they’ll move on to something else.
What do you do to educate while working with a short attention span?
So we use something called security alerts, which are incidents that have happened in the past. Not graphic stuff, but stuff that people can relate to. Like a person using a drill that got stuck and twisted their wrist. Things like that people can realize not to do it that way.
I think we need to figure out how to make microlearning even better in terms of an area of opportunity, in my opinion, because that’s what people gravitate towards. That’s what most people do now. If it’s more than two minutes, maybe five, if you’re lucky, people won’t notice. So we are really trying to improve in this area and keep the information up to date.
