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JR COMPANY’S TOP TEN THINGS
THAT CAN GO WRONG
ON A CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
By Michael DiMercurio
NUMBER 8: IMPROPER SAFETY PLAN AND MANAGEMENT
At the risk of sounding like a safety cheerleader, this point needs to be made. Safety should be implemented for its own sake. No project is worth an eyeball, a finger, a hand, a foot, or a life. A few years ago, a project manager witnessed a crane lattice collapse crush a craftsman. Watch something like that happen and you’re never the same. We go to work expecting to come home, and if one of us doesn’t, it will cast a black cloud over the rest of the project. End of sermon.
More to the point, though: A safe project is a cost-controlled project. Every circumstance that lends itself to safety also is indicative of a well-run, cost-controlled, schedule-controlled, quality-assured project.
On a construction project, the PM was given wide latitude to enforce the 100% tie-off rules. He would cruise the site in his pickup truck, and if he saw an offending worker, he would pile the man into the truck, drive him to the gate and have his badge destroyed. (Don’t try this trick in a tight labor market, folks.) It is one thing to have a zero tolerance policy. It is another entirely to ENFORCE a zero tolerance policy! It sent the message to the craft – don’t mess with the 100% tie-off rules.
That same project, incidentally, was on-schedule and under budget. Or not so incidentally.
If you investigate a construction accident, you’ll almost always find an environment of sloppiness that led to the accident. Accidents are like bar stools – they need three “determined” causes or else they don’t happen. Example, if you drive (a) on a pitch black night (b) while fatigued, that alone might not have enough determinate causes for an accident. But now add rain to the equation. Pitch black + fatigue + rain = high probability for an accident. In the field, poorly maintained safety harnesses + slack enforcement of tie-off rules + slippery conditions = an accident in the mail.
Therefore, if the jobsite is controlled with an eye to efficiency, cost control and schedule control, safety will be a side benefit. In like manner, safety incidents piling up are diagnostics of a project that is going off the rails in its other goals of cost control and schedule performance. Something is going wrong and needs to be fixed.
When the project execution strategy is written, contemplate the idea of a dedicated full-time safety professional in the project team. The right safety engineer can turn around a badly run and unsafe jobsite. In addition, determine at what level your subcontractors will need to add a dedicated safety superintendent. This kind of safety can be costly, but the costs of lost work and schedule saved by avoiding accidents will always pay for these manhours, and you should insist on that coverage when the budget is put together. Some companies are good at spouting safety slogans and not devoting a penny to safety. This is the point where common sense can turn this silliness around.
And use that digital camera. Walk around and take pictures of the entire jobsite, load them onto your computer, and make a slideshow. While you’re on the phone to the home office, watch the pictures parade across the screen. You’ll see unsafe acts and safety violations you completely missed in the field. Circle them, print them, and pass them out to the field hands. They may make a sour face, but they’ll appreciate that you are watching out for them.
Even better, have someone make the safety camera walk for you, someone the crews don’t recognize. Craftsman often “tighten up” when “the man” comes walking by, but if your document control clerk is walking around snapping digital pictures, the craft will work as they normally do, and you can see how safe your jobsite is when you’re not there to bark at the craft.
A safe job is a successful job.
Now if we can only keep a certain New York City tough guy project manager from kicking the copy machine in fury and injuring his foot!
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