Real-World Plans For Construction Safety Week

Q&A with Adolfson & Peterson Construction's Regional Safety Director, Travis Taylor

This year’s Construction Safety Week theme is “All in Together—Plan, Own, Commit.” This theme is mostly a framework; it’s up to the construction companies to determine how to customize it effectively for real-world issues.

We recently met with Travis Taylor, the Regional Safety Director for Adolfson & Peterson Construction in AP Gulf States, to discuss the company’s ongoing and enhanced commitments to worker safety at various job sites.

Q. What has Adolfson & Peterson planned for Construction Safety Week?

Travis Taylor: We’re launching a couple of important initiatives. Last year, after meeting with industry partners at Sundt Construction and receiving a lot of inspiration, we implemented our version of the Energy Wheel, a safety tool that helps identify hazards at a higher rate. When we know the problems, we can prevent them from turning into accidents. We want to be sure it’s working the way it should by testing it and compiling all of our data from the last year.

We’re also implementing new “Stop the STCKY” efforts to help further identify dangerous issues or stuff that can kill you—the STCKY term.

We have developed a new Energy Wheel that lists categories we see the most STCKY incidents like stuff built of heights or stuff that moves or crushes. This helps it relate better to the front-line workers. But this involves more than handing out this new wheel to project teams and telling them to follow it. We want project team leaders to get out onto the site, interact with the workers and pinpoint the potential stuff that can kill you. Once identified, we can take steps to stop it.

Q. What’s been driving these efforts?

Travis Taylor: This evolved from our commitment to doing whatever we can to protect workers on our job sites. AP and the industry as a whole does a good job of eliminating first aids and other small injuries or if needed, managing them to where employees are back to 100% in no time. But we need to continue to strengthen our focus in the area of fatalities and life-threatening injuries, which the industry has seen a flat line in the last few years.

Additionally, our clients have been demanding higher safety efforts. They like for us to come to them and say ‘there’s no incidents or hazards in the field or on our site.’ However, clients also want to see processes in place and know there are always things we can work on to continue identifying high-risk activities.

That’s where the STCKY walks come in. Project walk-throughs and audits help us find sticky activities in the field and confirm we have controls in place to protect our workers.

Q. How do you involve employees with the STCKY philosophy?

Travis Taylor: The foundation behind every protection plan is to put safety into the frontline employees’ hands. These employees need to be in a position where they’re not afraid to raise their hand if something doesn’t look right. Newer workers need to feel comfortable about mentioning they’re untrained to perform a specific task or to explain their concerns about doing something in a certain way. If we can get them more confident in making good decisions and using the right equipment, that’s the perfect formula.

We’re also working to simplify our safety audit, which is part of the STCKY walks. Right now, we have a 122-point safety audit. It’s an internal AP compliance requirement but no one in the field is going to open their phones, look at those 122 questions and say, ‘Yeah, I gotta get that next task done.’ Instead, the audit is only a handful of focused questions designed around each category on our energy wheel. This gives our employees more direction on what to look for in the field, making their participation more impactful.

Q. How will your employees react to this?

Travis Taylor: We tell them it’s okay to ask questions or raise concerns. We put the power to stop production on a site in their hands. In past industry practices, issuing a stop production order might have cost a worker their job on another site. But at AP, there’s never been a time when we fired anyone because they expressed a concern or issued a stop-production order. What we’re doing is instilling confidence so everyone knows they can ask questions or stop work if something seems problematic.

We’re relying on the STCKY implementation to help. Also, we select a safety champion each quarter based on participation in the field, who’s doing the most inspection observations and identifying the possible problems. We’re looking for the employee who cares enough to identify issues and give us data we can actually use.

Q. What about your trade partners? How do you ensure that they are current with safety procedures?

Travis Taylor: We go through a pre-qualification annually. We talk to the trade partners about their safety records and ask them to see their OSHA logs, which record injuries, incidents and fatalities. We also look at letters from their insurance companies; this tells us how much they pay for their insurance plans for employee injuries. We also review their Experience Modification Rate (EMR), which is a number based on the company’s historical cost of injuries and their future risk chances. We have a ranking; number one is the industry average. If the ranking is higher, it means the trade partners are paying above the industry average in terms of cost for injuries. We then have a conversation with the trade partner to understand and identify the situation and then decide if they are a fit for our project.

Q. What else can you tell us about AP and the ongoing commitment to construction site safety?

Travis Taylor: There’s no such thing as a perfect job site. What we can do is take proactive steps to identify the small and large hazards to reduce the chance of injury or death. This is what our new Energy Wheel and the STCKY walks are about. It’s also important to keep things simple while focusing on the right stuff.

Construction Safety Week, now in its 11^th year, has helped bring recognition and focus to safety throughout the industry. But, safety is more than just a week in the Spring for AP – it is a way of life that focuses on getting all employees and trade partners home safely at the end of each day.