Our BCS Safety Culture is more than just developing new policies and procedures, creating new incentive programs and giving out safety awards. It is definitely more than complying with OSHA rules and hiring more safety professionals. The BCS Safety culture is how every worker on every BCS jobsite 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 own 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, wejust have to be better today than we were yesterday.” People make mistakes, people get hurt. No matter how well trained our employees are, distractions, short cuts, 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 short cuts. Many of our injury accidents last year were due to bad habits that just 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 rthe phrase “See something, Say something.”
- We encourage everyone to be a safety professional. Who is more likely to see a safety issues first, the safety guy or 35 workers at The Travis or Broadmoor’s jobsites? 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, only then can jobsite 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 workers. This puts the responsibility for safety in the hands of one person or a small team. And when the safety team is assigned to only bigger jobsites of 25 or more employees, what happens to BCS safety program when 5 or 10 workers are on a jobsite? 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 misses. 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, jobsite posters about hand safety, will this be enough? 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 have to 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 ideas. We must focus on what we can control and like Ben Horton always says, :”We are always better as a team.”