Our BCS Safety Culture is more than just developing new policies and procedures, creating new incentive programs, and giving out safety awards. It is more than complying with OSHA rules and hiring more safety professionals. The BCS Safety culture is how every worker on every BCS job site does their job to prevent accidents. We like to think that we don’t just have six safety professionals at BCS. Everyone at BCS is a safety professional. Our Safety Culture will continue to develop based on client requirements, changes in the OSHA standard, and our jobsite activities that have more frequent injuries. Making our safety culture even stronger will depend on these behaviors:
- We expect improvement, not perfection. I like to say, “We don’t have to be perfect; we just have to be better today than we were yesterday.” People make mistakes; people get hurt. No matter how well-trained our employees are, distractions, shortcuts, being in a hurry, and other behaviors cause accidents. We have to praise workers who identify problems and suggest ideas for working more safely.
- We cannot tolerate shortcuts. Many of our injury accidents last year were due to bad habits that eventually caused an injury. Blocking machine guards, not using saw horses, approaching operators while their machine is still running, to name a few. When we recognize a bad habit that puts safety at risk, we have to say something before an accident happens. The safety guy can be everywhere on every job. Each employee should say the phrase, “See something, Say something.”
- We encourage everyone to be a safety professional. Who is more likely to see a safety issue first, the safety guy or the 35 workers at The Travis or Broadmoor’s Jobsite? Only when every employee at BCS feels a sense of commitment to safety, that safety is their job too, and that they won’t be punished for making a mistake can job site safety improve.
- We understand the role of the Safety team. We do not want to make the mistake of having 5 or 6 safety professionals be responsible for the safety of 300 wor rs. This puts the responsibility for safety in the hands of one person or a small am. And when the safety team is assigned to only more significant job sites of 25 or more employees, what happens to BCS safety program when 5 or 10 workers are on a job site? When everyone is part of the safety team, this separates the function from the people and helps reduce the risk of injury accidents.
- We need to study our near mi ses. In 2022, we had two recordable incidents. This is a great improvement, no doubt. But we had 12 First Aid Injuries, most of which were finger lacerations and smashed fingers; why so many? We have studied the trends and have implemented pinch point training, new cut-proof gloves, and job site posters about hand safety. Will this be en gh? Will our trends in 2023 be the same?
Reducing risk means more training, both in safety and operations. This also means identifying and using best practices. New workers are critical and must be welcomed into our safety culture. Our leaders have to coach, mentor, and teach. They have to speak up when they see something wrong so that our workers will speak up as well when they have observations or i as. We must focus on what we can control and like Ben Horton always says, :”We are always better as a team.”