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Construction safety week has started Over the next five days, workplaces across the country will stop work, review best practices and talk about the importance of safety.
Many of these discussions will focus on the week’s theme, “All Together.” That was last year’s mantra as well, but Safety Week leaders say they’re building on the work of previous years, while also focusing those efforts through a new lens of three actions: Recognize, Respond, Respect.
Actions change the context and move the conversation forward, Adam Jelen, CEO of Providence, Rhode Island-based Gilbane Building Co., told Construction Dive.
“It builds on the previous year and digs deeper. The themes are anchored in this unified call to action on high-energy, high-risk work to prevent serious injuries and fatalities,” said Jelen, who is also the chairman of the Construction Safety Week executive committee.
For top industry leaders, the topic has multiple meanings ranging from getting on the same page across organizations to arming teams with the tools they need to better protect each other.
What “All in all” means to leaders
Beginning in 2017, Shaun Carvalho, director of safety for Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, said the contractor joined its competitors in collaborating with the Associated General Contractors of Massachusetts to create a unified safety standard.
Creating a uniform security ideology was more difficult than he imagined, Carvalho said. This was due to the many different perspectives and angles from which the different builders viewed the work. But the effort was necessary.
“We all have to be in this together, because the trades that work on our individual jobs also work on our competitors’ jobs,” Carvalho said.
Teaching all workers, regardless of who is in charge of the workplace, to have the same safety knowledge proved to be a task worth undertaking.
Jelen said that exact unity-in-practice mentality is what has fueled the activity behind the Construction Safety Week theme.
“When companies use different terms and different models, the same exposure can be treated differently from job to job, and that creates gaps in recognition, response and adoption throughout the project lifecycle,” he said. “What we’re driving is simplification and standardization, especially in how we recognize, respond to and respect high-risk work. That way, teams aren’t being translated between systems every time they change jobs.”
Recognize, respond, respect
The technical team outlined the week’s actions in three newsletters published before Safety Week. Jelen emphasized the focus on high-energy hazards, sometimes called STCKYor things that can kill you. These refer to workplace hazards that can result in serious injury or death, often from working at a height or near fast-moving equipment or material.
To continue to improve, Jelen said, the executive committee wanted to recognize those high-energy hazards with the potential for serious harm, respond by putting protections in place to mitigate the hazards, and then honor the issues by taking the hazard seriously while valuing the time and safety of everyone on site.
Steve Spaulding, senior vice president and director of environmental health and safety for New York City-based Turner Construction, likened the three R’s to being a brother or sister’s keeper.
“The millions of people who work in the construction industry, no one is alone. And we need to make sure that everyone on the jobsite is taking care of each other and taking care of themselves,” Spaulding told Construction Dive. “We have to make sure that we’re recognizing the dangers and responding to them and respecting the people who are doing the work. But also that everyone is doing the same for everyone else.”
