Safety Spotlight: Pre-Planning for Safety

Project and task pre-planning is more common and necessary in today’s construction industry than ever before. Having the rights tools and products exactly when you need them, leads to a safer, faster work pace, and more efficient construction – which could result in savings to the Owner.

As construction professionals we need to include safety in our pre-planning efforts. In a perfect world, all risk would be engineered out of the building process, as it’s not, we must do our best to mitigate as much risk as we can. We know that decisions are sometimes made on the fly. While this may not impact production, it certainly has an impact on safety. As a safety professional, a common thing I hear after an incident is “I thought I would just do this real quick”. By taking the time to pre-plan safety into our projects we could eliminate many injuries and incidents in our industry.

Here at Neumann Brothers we pre-plan safety into our pre-construction meetings on every project. We start in the office before the project begins. Safety manuals, hazard analysis, and project orientations are completed prior to the job kicking off so that information can be relayed to our field workers and subcontractors in advance. We have also started rolling out our “weekly hazard analysis” forms for work performed by our field crews, as well as our subcontractor’s. These forms, to be filled out be each crew, detail tasks, the hazards associated with those tasks, and ways to mitigate those hazards. They are then returned to our weekly foreman meeting where they are discussed with the other trades so that hazard information is shared with everyone. The more you know, the more safe everyone can be on a jobsite.

By: Alec Schaufenbuel