Promoting Safety Through Planning and Personal Connections
September 30, 2018
What does it take to send the men and women who work on Clark jobsites home safely at the end of each day? It requires a relentless focus on two things – planning and people. During construction, prioritizing our people through relationship building, communication, and training is critical to ensuring a safe workplace from a project’s groundbreaking to its completion.
professionals make it a priority
to establish personal connections
with foremen and their crews.
Planning for a safe project starts before a single member of the project team dons a hardhat. During the preconstruction phase, our project teams examine every part of the project from a safety perspective to attempt to engineer hazards out of the job. We use lessons learned from similar past projects and data analytics to determine site conditions which are most likely to put a team member at risk for an injury.
With these tools, our team develops solutions for project-specific safety conditions. For example, there may be an opportunity for a concrete team to install anchors for fall protection when pouring a ceiling slab. This will help to protect the HVAC subcontractors and painters who come afterward to work in that space. Another simple example is having all masonry wall rebar dowels fabricated with a candy cane top to eliminate the need of rebar impalement protection. These efforts to find safer ways to build are then incorporated into the submittal, procurement, and fabrication processes, and ultimately implemented in the field.
Clark’s commitment to a climate of safety must be felt by every member of the team, from project officers to craftsmen, as soon as they step onto the jobsite. To help reinforce the daily importance of safety at every level, our superintendents and safety professionals make it a priority to establish personal connections with foremen and their crews. These relationships provide the foundation for daily conversations about jobsite conditions and safe work practices.
which are most likely to put a team member at risk
for an injury.
Proper training is an invaluable part of Clark’s commitment to safety as well. Toolbox talks, formal training sessions, and informal communications on the jobsite educate team members about safe construction methods and how to handle potentially dangerous situations. These methods, focused on steps that each member of the team can take each day to keep the jobsite safe, have a lasting impact on keeping our workforce out of harm’s way.
The safety of our project team not only affects our jobsites but impacts our spouses, children, friends and the community. At the heart of our planning and personal development efforts is a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the person working next to you.
