Keeping your crew safe is one of your most important responsibilities on the construction site. Learning how to manage your craftworkers and promote safety are the first steps to excelling in your safety performance ratings.
Promote Safety on the Job Site
Create a working culture that focuses on safety. Don’t let safety be an afterthought for you or anyone on the construction site. How do you create this construction safety platform? Here’s an example. Bob Overhoff, director of corporate safety at Buffalo-based general contractor LPCiminelli, stated that at his business, it’s not “safety first” but “safety always.”
The “safety always” motto is what he holds his crew to everyday to ensure just that: safety all the time, no matter what.
Use Technology
Utilizing today’s technology can help streamline safety into all elements of your construction business. There are technologies that audit and score your safety performance to keep you up-to-date. Audit your construction job site on a regular basis and adjust where you see fit. Your goal is to prevent accidents from happening, not fixing an area after an incident occurs.
Beyond just promoting safety on the job site, here are some safety performance ratings every general contractor should know:
Experience Modification Rate (EMR)
The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) determines the EMR, a computation that is a lagging indicator of performance. The EMR compares a company’s annual losses in worker compensation insurance claims against its policy premiums over a 3-year period. Note, the EMR computation excludes the most current year.
Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)
The Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) is an OSHA defined calculation. The TRIR uses a normalizing factor to support comparison of Injury and Illness performance for businesses in similar industries.
OSHA calculates the TRIR by multiplying the total number of OSHA recordable cases occurring in a business by 200,000, which is the average hours worked for a 100 employee company. This is then divided by the total number of employee hours worked for your operation. Note, this is a leading indicator of performance.
OSHA Violation Types
Other than Serious Violation
Though the Other Than Serious Violation has a direct relationship to job safety and health, it probably would not cause death or serious physical harm. Each violation is discretionary, with a proposed penalty in the thousands of dollars.
Serious Violation
A Serious Violation is in a different ballpark than the Other Than Serious Violation. This is a violation where there is a high probability that death or serious physical harm could happen. Additionally, it specifies that an employer either knew or should have known about the hazard. A Serious Violation is not discretionary, with a proposed mandatory penalty in the thousands for each violation.
Willful Violation
A willful violation means that an employer knowingly commits or commits with indifference to the law. The employer knew that a workplace hazard constitutes a violation or is aware that it existed and made no reasonable effort to eliminate it.
Certificate of Insurance (COI)
The Certificate of Insurance (COI) simply validates your company has the correct insurance to protect your workers and customers.