Safety First: It’s not just a catchy slogan
I write this newsletter on a snowy cold winter day. Ice and snow tends to make us think about how we are going to safely drive or shovel snow. It requires us to make a good plan. Planning for safety is something we do every day at Harman Construction. With that said I am proud to announce that we are the recipient of the VACO (The Virginia Contractors Group Self-Insurance Association) gold safety award for 2021. I give credit for this award to our operations and safety team which includes our safety managers, superintendents and each field employee who manage carefully how they work each day. Harman won this award in 2013 but quite frankly soon after that we felt we were getting complacent. There were warning signs that started to show and we invited our workers comp safety consultant to come in and audit our performance. The feedback we got showed that we needed to improve. Even though we had decent results we realized that we needed to fine tune our processes. This led us to reevaluate our safety program and this led us to take the following actions about 5 years ago.
We hired a safety manager to be solely focused on our safety program and our internal documentation and inspection process. Prior to that time we had our operations manager leading our safety efforts but we had him distracted with other responsibilities.
We purchased a safety reporting software package that enables us to document more clearly all of our inspections and track data.
We stepped up our inspections and now each job is reviewed weekly and violations discovered are fixed immediately….often times before the safety manager leaves the site.
We continued the use of voluntary VOSH inspections.
We increased our pre planning meetings before each major task begins on site.
Senior management became more vocal in emphasizing the importance of safety. It was clear at times employees felt that we valued production over safety.
We increased our training opportunities for our employees.
After many years of hard work we started to see the results trending in a good way. We hope you see this level of attention to detail on each of the projects that we do for you our clients. We feel that safety performance will be an indicator of the type of performance you see in other areas such as construction quality and project delivery. In closing I hope you all enjoy the beauty of a winter snow but also stay safe on the roads or in your driveway. You have our commitment to keep the projects we build for you operating safely.
