Work safety is something that’s always important, but when that work takes place at a construction site, safety requires special attention Otherwise, you run the risk of both placing your employers at danger, and getting potentially devastating legal action that can bring your operation to the ground.
While security fencing hire is an indispensable part of improving construction site safety, there are a number of other ways in which you can personally contribute to this process and get safety practices and focus entrenched in your work culture.
Awareness
Making your construction site a safe environment starts with building awareness of the dangers it can entail – something that should be done during the hiring process before workers even step foot on the site.
If you don’t make sure your future employees are aware of the hazardous aspect of this line of work, you risk hiring people who might not be suited to cope with it.
Training
Once everybody is fully aware of the risks involved, there have to be comprehensive, regular training sessions in place to help workers channel this awareness into the correct safety practices. Awareness alone is far from enough – there have to be established and uniform safety procedures that everyone follows.
While regular safety training seminars about general construction site safety are the norm, they should serve as a solid foundation that needs to be built on and reinforced by on-site training sessions that address site-specific points of interest. Plus, you get to witness their safety skills first-hand, identify potential liabilities and gaps in their knowledge, and fix them.
Regular safety meetings should also be held, even if just to run over the fundamentals and give employees a more official platform to voice concerns and ask questions.
Safety Inspections
Safety inspections are basically the safety training of construction sites. They should be done regularly and diligently as a precaution rather than an aftermath procedure.
Even if your budget doesn’t allow getting an external safety consultant, you could easily do a safety inspection once a week yourself and avoid huge hurdles down the line.
Near Miss Reporting
Just because a hazardous situation didn’t actually come to be a full-blown accident doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern. On the contrary, this preliminary phase is precisely the time to address the underlying issues while they’re still latent, so to speak – anything done afterward is already too late.
In fact, a Heinrichs study from 1950 reveals that roughly 1 in 10 near misses eventually results in an actual accident.
Something as simple as a near miss reporting system, even if it’s merely a near miss report form, can go a long way in preventing serious accidents.
Housekeeping Rota
Work-related accidents are often the result of a messy environment, and that’s particularly true for construction sites which are somewhat messy and chaotic by default. Certain dangers can be hard enough to spot as it is, and covering them with rubbish complicates matters even further.
You need to do your best to keep your site tidy as it improves visibility tremendously and respectively reduces the chances of accidents. Even if you’re on a tight budget and can’t have cleaning staff all the time, delegating the cleaning responsibilities between the whole team will make them far less arduous.
As an added bonus, the process of cleaning will help workers identify and memorize potentially dangerous spots and areas.
Documentation
While documentation may conjure up associations with bureaucracy, it is an indispensable part of improving construction site safety.
If not for anything else, proper documentation is required to initiate a lot of safety procedures.
Furthermore, documentation allows you to keep useful information regarding hazards and action plans organized and easily accessible, helping you spot holes in your safety procedures and patterns in accidents.
Furthermore, some particularly delicate jobs like blasting, for example, should always be assigned to workers who have gone through a comprehensive background check and rigorous training – things that need to be accounted for with the proper certification.
Last but not least, following the documentation protocol, even if it’s just a formality, protects construction firms from very costly legal actions.
Proper Eating
It may seem irrelevant or possibly even somewhat of a whim, but eating correctly on the work site is actually associated with less risks.
A study from the Olympic Delivery Authority demonstrated that accidents occur at the highest rate just before lunch, when everybody’s hungry. We all know how an empty stomach can destabilize your concentration, and sometimes all it takes is a single moment of neglect.
As you can see, improving construction site safety, especially on a fundamental level, isn’t rocket science, but unfortunately, it often goes overlooked. Following those basics can really spare you lots of hassles, and even something way worse.
How to Improve Construction Site Safety - Let's Fix It
10-electric-fencing-tips-for-your-garden-and-keeping-horses