A Program Management Approach : Safety Considerations

“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.” - Cicero

A detailed Health, Safety, and Environment Management Plan (HSE Plan) is required for every construction project, and given the added dangers of working at extreme heights, this is especially true for a super tall.??

Project Manager Involvement

The Project Manager should first develop an indicative plan which defines the principal HS&E requirements associated with the physical works conducted by the contractor(s) and any other entities involved with carrying out activities on the worksite.?The HS&E plan shall apply to all aspects of the contractor(s) scope of work, including all aspects conducted by subcontractors and other entities. The plan shall be included by the Project Manager in the tender documents and made enforceable as a part of the contracted works. As local regulations vary by country, attention must be paid towards local law, to ensure that what’s being presented is enforceable (and practical).

HSE Plan?

As the plan is indicative, each contractor(s) working on site must then develop their own HS&E plan that complies with the project requirements and is specific to their work.?The overall objective is to eliminate foreseeable dangers to the health and safety of all personnel at the source.?The purpose of the HS&E plan is to describe the HS&E-related activities that will be employed in the construction of the works.?The plan represents the strategies for conducting safe work, preserving personnel, property, and equipment and outlines the processes by which the contractors should manage HS&E issues, provide suggested practices and procedures to follow, and train their staff.

Contractor Responsibility

Although the contractor(s) have the primary and sole responsibility for their statutory health, safety, and environmental obligations, each employee on the project is responsible for their own health and safety and of the people around them.?It is therefore paramount that each employee on the project fully understands all project HS&E rules and standards, and those HS&E rules and standards specifically concerned with the work they perform.?

Plan, Do, Check, Adjust (PDCA)

While plans are a good initial step, continually enforcing and improving the plans is the key. The foundation of improvement and sustainment in safety is applying the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycle for learning and continuous improvement. This cycle includes the following general principles:

• Identifying a problem or desired improvement;
• Developing a hypothesis of how to solve the problem or improve; ?Testing potential solutions and countermeasures;
• Measuring results and comparing to expected outcomes;
• Adjusting the hypothesis or setting current as the standard, and ?Sharing lessons learned with the rest of the project.

Culture of Continuous Safety Improvement

The goal is to have all project stakeholders fully engaged and committed to safety including the owner, project manager, contractors, and laborers.?Recommended practices for achieving this include:

• Safety Induction.?Safety induction and training of each worker before they commence work, often in group classes and led by high-ranking members of the project management and contracting team;
• Personal Protection Equipment.?Providing workers with proper personal protective equipment and training them on its use and limitations.?This should also include training regarding the inspection of personal protection equipment, as it is common for relevant gear to be worn out and rendered less effective over time (and super tall project schedules typically last several years for all trades).
• Regulatory Training.?Competent persons at the site to complete OSHA 30-hour coursework (or local equivalent). Care should be taken to consider the local market since many super-tall projects are located in developing countries where English may not be the most effective language of instruction.
• Tool Box Talks.?Daily toolbox talks on relevant work activities should engage the workers, at times selecting high-performing laborers to participate in being trainers themselves.
• Daily Stretching.?Daily stretching before work begins, promotes working together, sharing a culture of inclusion, and the obvious benefits of making the body ready for several hours of strenuous activity.
• Preplanning.?Preplanning of safety practices for each new work activity onsite. This can be completed in method statements, Job Hazard Analyses, or Pre-Task Plans.
• Senior Management Involvement.?Upper management involvement from the contractor and project manager attending periodic safety audits.?This is critical to “setting a tone” regarding the importance of safety and continuous improvement.
• Jobsite Safety Stand Downs.?Annual safety stand downs where all contractors suspend all onsite to cover a topic of improvement in great detail. This reaffirms all stakeholders’ commitment to safety and the fundamental role project-specific safety programs play in the successful delivery of our work.
• Safety Boards.?A safety board should be installed both describing and illustrating safe practices, showing pictures of workers’ families to reinforce a safe work culture.?These practices create “buy-in” amongst the project labor and serve as a constant reminder of how one can never lapse in their commitment to safety.

• Trade Worker Feedback.?Always make an anonymous reporting platform/comment card box available for workers to communicate issues. Actively solicit feedback where they can communicate openly. An example program is “5 Worker Lunches”, where project management asks a different trade foreman to send in an employee to the office for lunch, reaffirm no consequences for open feedback during the forum, and see what issues they are seeing of which higher management may not yet be aware.
• Milestone Recognition.?Recognition of safety milestones, for example, one-million-man hours achieved without a lost time incident onsite.
• Incentives & Penalties.?Safety fines and rewards are successful techniques in maintaining safe work sites. These are typically enforced by the project or construction manager and must be substantial enough in magnitude so that after repeated violations it becomes more expensive for the offending contractor to continue in an unsafe manner than to change their protocol.

Safety Programs Based on Lean Thinking

Implementation of Lean Safety Programs is essential for super tall projects and can include partnering between safety management and construction management for field implementation.?Examples are:

• 5S. “Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain.” Seeing and solving issues, 5S is a fundamental process in manufacturing but is also highly effective in construction.
• Nothing Hits the Ground.?All materials that are on the project site are on pallets or stacked on dunnage to keep them mobile. This creates mechanical material movement scenarios, reducing worker exposure to soft tissue injuries, and freeing up workspaces faster.
• “Just-In-Time” Deliveries.?Receiving material as, when, and where needed reduces material storage on site, improves housekeeping, and optimizes inventory management.

Prevention through Design (PTD) & Building Information Modeling (BIM) Integration

PTD & BIM are examples of processes that can be integrated with safety.?PTD is upstream in that it seeks to transfer risk back to the design phase.?

Examples include parapet heights or control locations in crowded mechanical rooms. BIM creates an opportunity to visualize how a project comes together, in a way that we’ve never had before. Model checking can give an accurate visualization of items that will need to be mitigated during construction.??