The first week of May, GLA celebrated Construction Safety Week along with the rest of the industry. Although GLA always highlights safety as the top priority in each partnering session, Construction Safety Week serves as a reminder to the entire industry to continually maintain high safety standards, acknowledge industry leaders who have made innovations to protect their workers and the public, and shed light on what we could do better industry-wide.
Mental Health’s Impact on Construction Safety
Construction Safety Week also serves to remind us that prioritizing safety is about more than wearing hard hats on site, working with hazardous equipment, and the like. As a matter of fact, safety practices extend beyond those factors to the things we cannot see: impacts on mental health. The risks involved on a construction site can be fatal and the consequences have the potential to affect many families, so it is crucial that construction workers remain vigilant both physically and mentally as individuals and as a team. “Struggles with anxiety, depression or stress, family tension, financial concerns, unresolved arguments or frustrations, can all lead to distraction, miscommunication and unpreparedness, all primary causes of workplace incidents… In order to ensure holistic safety, we must strive to create both a physically and mentally safe environment, and make every aspect of our well being part of our safety culture and programs” (Construction Safety Week).
Safety in Construction Partnering
To better prioritize the safety of all of our project teams in support of and beyond Construction Safety Week, GLA utilizes DashTech, a web-based tool that tracks project key metrics. Our project teams use DashTech as their primary platform to track project progress, record action items, and share ideas for safety innovations. Project team members are able to record ideas for safety innovations anonymously, which our construction partnering facilitators then address to the team in their partnering sessions. The anonymity of responses encourages team members to submit their safety concerns and ratings (ranging from excellent to poor) with honesty and without apprehension, creating a safe environment where they can effectively focus on and resolve the addressed issues. Furthermore, recording these safety innovations allows for great opportunities for crowdsourcing. If safety innovations work for one project, our facilitators gather and maintain that feedback in order to utilize prior innovations for applicable future projects. Sam Hassoun, President of GLA, has said that “DashTech is the only company that was able to fully understand the needs of our construction projects, and provide a dashboard measuring the key priorities of these projects. I can not imagine GLA or their clients working on any project without the partnership and tools DashTech provides.”
We at GLA not only celebrated Construction Safety Week in May, but we embrace and advocate for safety every day of the week, month, and year! GLA and our project teams go above and beyond in order to make safety the number one priority on all projects. Construction Safety Week serves as an important time to reflect on our collective purpose as an industry. We need to contemplate what’s working, come up with innovative solutions, and pay gratitude to our industry leaders who help to protect their employees and the public.
