Report Shows Safety Practices Make Construction Companies Up to 770% Safer

A report by ABC shows how using proactive safety practices to reduce recordable incidents by 87 percent, makes the best-performing companies 770 percent safer than industry average. The report emphasizes the importance of ABC’s Safety Training Evaluation Process (STEP), which is an evaluation provided free to members.

The Safety Performance Report uses data from more than one billion hours of work in construction. Using statistically valid methodology developed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it tracked 35 data points from last year’s STEP participants to determine the correlation between implementing leading indicator use and lagging indicator performance, which is measured by the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) and Days Away and Restricted or Transferred (DART) rate.

Among the findings:

• Companies that attained the highest level of STEP participation—Diamond—reduced their TRIR by 87 percent compared to the BLS industry average of 3.5 injuries/fatalities per 100 full-time employees.
• STEP participants with substance abuse programs in place dramatically outperform those without an implemented program in
  terms of safety by 36 percent.
• Companies that conduct an in-depth indoctrination of new hires into the safety culture, systems and processes based on a documented orientation process experience 48 percent to 50 percent lower incident rates respectively.
• Companies that conduct only monthly toolbox talks have a TRIR more than four times higher than those that hold them daily.
• STEP participants who conduct frequent inspections, corrections and learnings lead to a 58 percent reduction in TRIR rates and a 59 percent
  reduction in DART rates.

The full report can be found here.

By Kyle Schwarm