As a site manager, one of your key concerns will always be ensuring crew safety. Construction sites remain one of the most hazardous work environments in the modern day and age, and it’s essential that managers take these risks seriously.
Luckily, we now have a much larger range of solutions available to us than ever before. From getting the right PPE for your crew to providing in-depth safety training, these are a few important ways that you can work on ensuring crew safety.
PPE
One of the most important elements of crew safety in all construction settings is PPE. Exactly what that PPE looks like will depend on the hazards that are present in the worksite more generally, and the hazards that individual workers will face due to their specific role.
It’s important to ensure that the PPE you buy is high quality. Whether that’s a particle filter for people drilling in stone, or gloves for general labourers moving wood and other materials around, this simply isn’t an area that you want to try to cut corners in.
Create stable pathways
With larger construction sites – especially those large enough to need substantial quantities of building supplies driven through daily – you need to create a network of stable pathways.
You can hire modular roadways from companies like Davis Track Hire, which are designed to provide both a stable path for vehicles and pedestrians and to protect the ground underneath.
Getting the right pathway can be especially important on worksites where the ground is unstable and delicate, such as in more rural construction sites.
Risk assessment
The practical measures outlined above are great examples of solutions for worksite hazards, but first, you need to work on identifying those hazards. For construction site managers, this means taking the risk assessment process seriously.
Following HSE guidelines, go through every process, piece of equipment and project that you expect to be present on the worksite. Try to understand the different hazards that each of these poses, and work on finding the best risk mitigation strategies based on those identifiable hazards.
Employee training
Lastly, you can’t just rely on technologies and equipment to keep your crew safe. Arguably the most important aspect of safety on construction sites is providing safety training. This needs to cover everything from how to use dangerous machinery properly to how to raise the alarm in the event of a serious chemical spill.
This training will need to be closely related to the actual hazards that are present on the worksite, and will likely require regular updating. In some cases, you won’t actually need to provide the training, but you will need to ensure that the worker in question has already completed it within an appropriate historical timeframe.
Crew safety should be a central part of the site planning process, from the very beginning. It will dictate how you proceed, with many aspects – such as pathway hire and employee training – needing to be taken care of long before any of the work can start.
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How can construction site managers ensure crew safety?