Trends in Managing Health & Safety in Construction
Workers on a construction site are unfortunately statistically at higher risk than in many other workplaces. A tiny electrical/mechanical malfunction, a slippery surface, or a small distraction can cause serious injury or even death in some scenarios. A recent report shows that the construction sector accounted for the most on-site fatalities in 2020.
Leading construction companies have already outgrown traditional safety systems. Rather than relying on safety nets and harnesses, the modern safety approach focuses on a mindset shift and more individual awareness by leveraging technology.
Let’s look at some modern-day ways of managing health and safety on a construction site:
Let’s take a brief look
1. Considering safety to be a shared responsibility
The best way to improve safety standards on a construction site is to make it part of the company’s ethos. Safety should always be prioritized by any employee or worker on-site. Safety training should be mandatory for all workers. Along with the operational safety training, every worker should be trained to have a mindset that is accountable for their individual and environmental safety.
The involvement of every on-site worker in day-to-day safety management operations will be a game changer. It will increase awareness among all individuals resulting in lower incident rates.
Implementation of the collaborative safety management system is also more accessible with the help of technology. For example, the observations feature on saifety.ai’s mobile app lets every worker on-site broadcast any observations quickly from their phone.
2. Enforcing eTools for safety management
Traditional safety systems, i.e., safety nets, harnesses, and more, focus on lowering the impact of any incident if it happens. On the flip side, the modern way of managing safety addresses the root cause by focusing on mitigating the chance of incidents occurring.
Some Advanced AI-based Solutions, that would be the future of Construction industry, (eTools) can actively monitor the complete construction site and trigger real-time alerts in case of hazard detection.
The impact of eTools is so remarkable that the US Department of Occupational safety and health administration (OSHA) offers eTools as a part of its enforcement guidelines that deliver practical assistance via their different modules.
3. Investing in leveraging robots for high-risk tasks
The world of technology is so fast that the practical implications have gone beyond imagination. For all high-risk industries, including construction, robots are being invented to conduct ever more complex high-risk tasks. Construction sites augmenting humans with these robots have seen a severe drop in injuries and fatalities in their workplaces.
Using cranes and lifts to elevate heavy objects instead of a group of workers is more efficient and safer. Having a centralized system for regular site checkups and inspections can be helpful for health & safety officers.
Deploying any technology has the perception of large capital expense, and often it can be, but viewing and assessing it over a more extended period and more wholistically can help to remove this perception from it being a cost to it adding value.
Summarising the above points, implementing technology and the mindset shift of all the workers to be self-accountable can drastically improve any construction site’s workplace health and safety management. Thus it is high time for construction businesses to take a leap in technological advancements and build a safety-centric culture.
