How to improve safety culture in construction?

Improved construction safety culture helps construction companies become successful. Safety practises, and attitudes are vital to ensuring that workers in your company are not struck by objects, suffer a fatal fall or are caught between heavy equipment. Prioritising safety practices helps to avoid severe work delays, hefty fines and high insurance costs for the company.

It is the sole responsibility of business owners to not only keep the site safe but also to ensure worker retention, improved return on investment and guaranteed project quality. In this article, we will talk about how construction companies can improve their safety culture.

Building an Occupational Health and Safety Management System

An Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) is a framework that helps construction companies consistently highlight and control their health and safety risks and minimise the potential for incidents. An OHSMS creates a proactive environment, enabling the organisation to accomplish goals by adhering to various regulations. Thus, an OHSMS helps to improve workplace safety and allows the organisation to achieve compliance with health and safety legislation while continually improving its performance.

Most efficient OHSMS are based on employee participation, management leadership, risk identification, risk control, hazard prevention and program evaluation. One of the most loved OHSMS across the globe is the one outlined by the ISO 45001 standard.

Training

Adequate training of your workers is the easiest way to improve your company’s safety culture. Proper training helps keep your workers motivated and committed to the safety practices of your organisation. Ongoing training will help your workers understand what is required to maintain a level of safety, retain what they have learnt and keep safety on the top of their minds.

Here, ISO 9001 is extremely helpful in identifying the training needs of your employees. In an ideal situation, an ISO consultant will come to your organisation and conduct a gap analysis to identify any skill gaps. The consultant will then recommend training programmes that can further enhance your organisation’s safety culture.

Similarly, standards such as ISO 23814:2009 will help to identify the competency requirements for crane operators and ins pectors. This will help you attract the right talent to your organisation so that safety is never compromised.

Get workers involvedand invested

To improve the safety culture in your construction company, you must put together a safety committee that monitors all the safety activities in your organisation, including employees from all levels of your business. In an ideal situation, employees should be involved in reviewing and updating your organisation’sorganisation’s safety programme, creating job-site-specific safety plans during each phase of the construction project. Only your employees’ input can help identify potential hazards and safety concerns that are unique to your organisation and to the construction project you have undertaken.

The benefit of identifying safety concerns unique to your organisation is that corrective plans can be tailor-made, utilising your employees’ input so that both safety and efficiency are augmented. Now, employee engagement is a tricky part of business management.

To appropriately engage your employees, you must showcase transformational and effective leadership. The problem with leadership is that there is a considerable gap between theory and actual-world practice. Business owners are aware of the theoretical concepts behind leadership but cannot implement them in their organisation, as the recommendations seem too far-fetched.
Here, ISO 9001 bridges theory and practice by breaking down leadership into concrete steps. Leaders can now showcase their commitment by creating safety policies by utilising employees’ inputs in the management reviews and demonstrating their support by allocating the resources the employees need to develop these safety programmes.

Additionally, to make the other employees aware of the safety programme, both ISO 9001 and ISO 45001 are excellent in ensuring that all workers are aware of the plan so that its proper execution and enforcement can be done. Furthermore, you will be guided to assemble an accident response team for each job site, so that appropriate steps can be taken in the event of an injury or to mitigate any hazards.

Best ISO consultant in Australia

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published more than 21700 international standards related to different industries, where over 1100 are dedicated to construction. With so many standards to choose from, you need additional guidance.

An ISO consultant will provide you with customised advice to help you select the most suitable standard for your business to reap the maximum benefits in the shortest amount of time. To choose the “best ISO consultant in Australia,” hold a few meetings with the ISO consultancy services you have shortlisted. Your focus should be on their field of specialisation and their history of successful case studies.

To verify their expertise, you can even ask them to read a few of the case studies, obviously, with the client’s personal details censored.

Also read : “How To Have A Successful Construction Business?”

Conclusion

To improve the safety culture of construction, business owners need to build an occupational health and safety management system, provide adequate training to the employees and get them involved and invested in the safety programmes.