At CRB, one of the critical intentions of any onboarding effort must be to have the new employees clearly understand expectations and also immediately feel like they are an essential part of the project or organization. When team members feel connected and valued early on, then they quickly begin impacting the success.
Culture: making safety your default
Leveraging your people and systems to support an EHS strategy is all well and good—as long as what is said matches what is done. Your workplace culture, in other words, is the guiding force that makes sure people do the right thing even when it is time-consuming and unpopular. Malcolm Gladwell proposes in The Tipping Point that when we pay attention to the seemingly smaller, less significant hazards, we can make better decisions to avoid putting ourselves at risk. These smaller examples set the tone and expectations of behavior on a project.
These expectations regarding how we work together and keep each other safe are critical and must be very clear. Team members need to know that doing the right thing is non-negotiable and shortcuts aren’t an option. When we talk about expectations, they need to include behavioral norms like stopping to ask questions if you don’t understand something. Similarly, if someone stops you from an unsafe act, you’re expected to respond respectfully, understanding they are looking after you and your family. Finally, if you see something unsafe you must intervene and will be supported in doing so.
Team members may be apprehensive to speak up when their intervention can cause increased costs and delays, so it’s important to outline accountability from an EHS perspective for them. Clarifying and abiding by these expectations is imperative in building a trusting environment where your team feels safe to do the right thing.
Safety by Design
When construction and design are separate entities, safety tends to be pushed out and only considered once boots are on the ground. However, we can take a more holistic approach that considers safety during the design process and achieves better outcomes. Safety by Design promotes collaboration between design and construction teams to ensure that projects are both safe to build and safe to use. For example, oftentimes there are design and engineering solutions that can contribute not only to the safety of those who will work, maintain and operate the facility, but also to the people who are working towards its construction.
By creating a culture of safety around a project that includes the design team, we prevent incidents, improve efficiencies, and deliver better projects. But how do you get design and construction working together from the very start? An integrated project delivery approach, like our ONEsolution™ process, creates early cross-team collaboration that enables safety processes and unified culture from the beginning. This is critical and impactful as the culture of the project team gets established before any contractors start working. For us, ONEsolution allows us to pre-empt safety concerns in the design phase so that construction crews aren’t working against the design they’re handed.
Build safe budgets
Resources need to be explicitly set aside for continued EHS support, training, and monitoring. This is not the budget line item to negotiate with the client, and if there is client pushback, you can make the case that a robust EHS strategy saves time and costs by pre-empting and avoiding shutdowns and injuries. Approaching this as non-negotiable helps your team to work with clients aligned to your values regarding employee welfare.