Much of construction Project focus is on safety. It’s an important focus. It’s about protecting workers and keeping them injury-free. Life – even work life – should always be foremost in our thinking – ahead of profit and schedule and everything else.
Construction once had a reputation for being lackluster about safety. Even as safety improves, many still say that “injuries are inevitable”. But, that’s now been shown to be false. Injuries are not inevitable. Through government enforcement, Owner insistence, and contractor initiative, positive safety measurement has grown from having a low number of deaths to having no first aid cases and no near misses. It’s become about worker health not worker lack of injury. It happened through focus and effort and genuine caring about the workers – through an attitude that “injuries are NOT inevitable”.
Instead of post-accident root cause analysis, safety management has become about analysis of the work task before starting work. It’s about prevention and worker involvement. If something does happen, it results in a top to bottom investigation and real attempt at lessons learned.
Productivity and schedule have long been key parts of large construction Projects. How can these elements of a Project improve on the scale that safety has improved? What if schedules went from “we’ll never meet that schedule” to “we can meet any schedule”?What if planning went from a dreaded chore to collaborative fun? What if productivity hardly needed measuring since “we always improve productivity”?
These sound like dreams.
So did “zero accidents” several years back.