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Creating a Culture of Safety in Construction: Building a Data-Driven Safety Program

July 29, 2020

Despite enormous industry investment in safety, construction work continues to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

Everyone knows this, yet institutional complacency and persistent it-will-never-happen-to-me attitudes cause hundreds of thousands of injuries in the industry each year.

These injuries cost construction companies millions of dollars in fines, legal fees, work stoppages, and subpar EMRs (Experience Modification Rates) that lead to increased insurance premiums and missed job opportunities.

Danger is inherent in the industry, but with a modern, data-driven safety program, you can minimize risk and proactively identify problems before a catastrophic event occurs.

Safety and compliance reporting at scale

An effective safety program protects both the immediate and long-term. First, it must enable quick identification and remediation of hazards. Second, it should provide an easily accessible record of incidents that enables safety managers to discover recurring or systemic problems.

Paper inspection checklists don’t do that, and certainly not at scale.

Construction safety at scale

With an automated mobile data collection and reporting platform, workers can complete their daily inspections with the smartphone they’re already carrying, and managers can see the results as they come in. What’s more, anyone who sees a hazard on a work site can document it — and snap a photo instead of spending time explaining the problem — and share it in real-time.

Those records are all stored safely in the cloud, where they can be viewed from a web dashboard, enabling safety managers to visualize trends and discover recurring problems that need to be addressed on a foundational level.

This empowers companies to ensure their safety programs are continuously optimized to better protect their workers, their reputation, and their EMR.

Fulcrum’s Construction Safety Apps

With Fulcrum’s mobile data collection and workflow automation platform, you can digitize any checklist to streamline your safety processes, whether they are mandated by OSHA or internally developed.

Once an inspection is complete, users can automatically generate reports to kick off new workflows — for example, by notifying your repair technician when a piece of heavy equipment has failed.

Fulcrum provides unique geospatial insights, too, by automatically attaching GPS coordinates to every action that your workers take, which enables you to:

  • See exactly where a team member was standing when they took a picture that triggered an action
  • Visualize the locations of the worst offenders and biggest hazards in your workplace
  • Track how long it takes for your workers to travel from one location to another to complete their inspections

Try that with paper.

Data-driven construction safety

As workers conduct their regular safety inspections throughout the day, the records sync to the Fulcrum dashboard so managers can see, in real-time, the effectiveness of their safety programs. In areas without WiFi or cellular service, team members complete their inspections as normal, and the data syncs to the dashboard once connectivity is restored.

Here are just a few examples of how our users are improving safety and compliance with our platform:

Site safety inspection: From documenting dangerous working conditions and observed hazards to misuse of equipment, this form enables construction managers to ensure a safe working environment that is compliant with OSHA regulations.

Hazard reporting: Turn your entire workforce into safety and compliance officers and give management instant visibility into potentially dangerous situations before they become a problem.

Job safety analysis: Conduct a systematic examination of a job to identify safety hazards and reduce risk of accidents and injuries and ensure that your workers are trained on proper protocols.

Construction incident investigation: Use this form to perform a thorough investigation of construction incidents to determine the factors that lead to it and prevent similar occurrences in the future.

You can download any of the pre-built forms in our app gallery and modify them to accommodate your needs or create custom inspection forms from scratch using our drag-and-drop app builder — no coding required.