National Construction Safety Week is May 6 – 10, we encourage you to bring safety to life this week. Follow this link for resources to celebrate.
What does safety mean to you? Does it mean buckling your seatbelt and backing into parking spaces? Every time? Does it mean wearing your PPE, or not, when you walk onto a jobsite? Are you making an intentional choice? What safety means to me is knowing that it takes a multitude of intentional consistent actions to build safety habits. That it’s my responsibility to make sure I make it home safely as well as looking out for my colleagues and helping them to make it home safely too.
Are you the best? You could be if you are a safety conscious company and committed to best safety practices. The Virginia BEST (Building Excellence in Safety, Health and Training) Program accepts, recognizes, and supports companies with progressive safety programs dedicated to continual improvement. The journey begins long before the first level application. It begins with the desire to make sure everyone makes it home safely followed by a good hard look in the mirror.
Before OSHA was created in 1971, there were 14,000 workplace deaths per year. Fast forward to 2022 and the number of construction workers who died on the job has dropped to 1,069 (at a rate of 9.6 fatalities for every 100,000 full-time workers).
The compliance safety-cop model of safety that grew out of the development of OSHA made a significant improvement in worker safety, reducing incidents, and saving lives. However, there are still too many workplace injuries and death.
The leading edge of the industry is moving towards a more collaborative model focused not just on compliance but on building strong people-centered cultures of support and caring. No one goes to work and thinks, "I want to get hurt today." Inherently people want to work safely.
There are many people that believe that working safely slows down production. In actuality, one incident drastically effects production through time lost in stand downs, investigations, and distracted workers coping with the emotions of an injury or death. As well as, the financial impact of the claim and expense of staff time to manage the incident, trainings, investigations, and taking the injured employee to appointments. The best projects are in fact those that have quality, safety, and production all in balance.
This is where the Virginia BEST Program comes in. It provides a platform as a safety management program to clearly define the areas that make a quality program and build an exemplary safety culture where employees feel valued, supported, and are well-trained. The BEST Program takes it one step further by not just addressing BEST companies’ employees, policies, and procedures, but by bringing the trade contractors they work with along with them. BEST companies create a safety ripple through the industry by supporting, sharing, and requiring best practices in safety. As companies grow in BEST, employees feel seen, heard, and valued. They are less likely to change companies when they feel cared for.
When companies start on their BEST journey, they often worry employees and trade partners will be resistant. Sometimes that is true, but once they realize that the goal is a safety collaboration and not a punitive safety situation they engage and really start to take the message and culture to heart. As the culture shifts, people are more likely to speak up, look out for one another, and make better choices. It is no surprise that when that happens, everyone makes it home safe. I challenge you to come and be a Virginia BEST company.
Current Virginia Best Companies:
Level 2:
Level 1: