Surveys have shown that the numbers of fatalities that occur in most construction site are on the increase, and perhaps this is why The Safety, Health, and Welfare at work Act 2005 are being enforced ruthlessly.
But even in the absence of this Act, the role of leadership in preventing accidents at a construction site is key. For any construction project to successfully run to completion, then the project managers need to be aware of the importance of their role.
But do they even know the training and supervision they need to manage projects? And also if you want to consume your time through using new technologies at the construction site so we use trailers also and nowadays there are many trailers that consume your time like Dump trailer, Refuse trailer and many more.
This article will highlight the important safety training and supervision that are required during construction.
But even before we look at safety training, why do we need supervisor training?
A project cannot successfully run to completion without the input of supervisors. It is through the dedication of supervisors that some important programs at the construction site can be implemented.
In most cases, supervisors are simply promoted based on technical knowledge, and not necessarily on supervisory skills. This is why it is important for supervisors to be trained on their role as supervisors.
Management Leadership
As already mentioned above, the success of any construction project depends heavily on the kind of leadership it gets. Project managers and project owners play a core role in ensuring that the construction project goes as planned.
One key role of the project leadership is their commitment to ensuring that any health hazard at the workplace is eliminated. The project managers must make the health and safety of every employee at the site a priority. This can be done by setting safety and health goals and objectives, and implementing them as the work goes on.
Think of a situation where the management of a construction site is just too happy to set up goals and objectives, only to leave them to the discretion of the employees to implement them. This in itself can be hazardous, as very few would want to comply with the core values that have been set up.
It is, therefore, necessary for the management to lead by example. They should be the ones on the forefront of implementing the objectives to keep everyone at the site, whether workers or just visitors, safe.
Encourage Worker Participation
There is no way one can put up rules and regulations to govern the implementation of a certain program without involving those to be governed.
In a construction site, it is particularly important for the management to seek the views of the workers on how some safety procedures can be attained. Note that it is their lives and health that needs to be protected. Thus their contribution is a valuable asset.
The workers need to be involved in all the steps, including setting up the goals and objectives, identifying the hazards, investigating incidences among many others.
This way, whatever the leadership might not have been able to identify, the workers will help, thus comprehensively providing a safety program that will minimize accidents at the construction site.
Encourage Free Communication
While it is always good to have a communication protocol at the workplace, it is more beneficial if the workers are encouraged to freely communicate their grievances to the leadership. And it should not just be grievances; it can as well be opinions, suggestions, and others, which are all meant to help in the successful completion of the project.
It is through free communication that any kind of training can happen and be successful. Workers need to be taken through hazard control measures while at the workplace and be well equipped with the tools that can help prevent some of the accidents that are often witnessed.
Hazard Identification and Assessment
The leadership of a construction project should cooperate with the employees to identify potential hazards that are likely to compromise the safety of each on the site. And the identification of the hazards is not a job just for the supervisors, but the workers should also be involved given that they are the ones that will be on the ground.
Once the hazards have been identified, the leadership should now identify possibly preventive measures to be implemented. Controls need to be selected based on the priority as established by the supervisor, as not all hazards can cause the same magnitude of a problem.
Program Evaluation and Improvement
As a supervisor, you need to be aware that the safety program you are implementing needs to be evaluated to assess its effectiveness. Among the things to look out for include the number of accidents that have been witnessed ever since the safety program was put into place, the confidence of the workers while working among many other things.
You also need to put into place processes that can help you identify the program’s shortcomings so that you can improve them after evaluation. Note that the strengths of the programs need to be improved in order to achieve efficiency at the construction site.
Management to Allocate Resources
Every safety program that any construction company might come up with will require resources for implementation. As such, it is necessary that these resources are allocated in a timely manner, to enable the implementers of the safety program to incorporate it into their work.
It is after this that the evaluation of whether the program has been successful or not can take place. If there are delays in providing resources, then the safety programs that have been identified might not work as expected.
As a committed owner of a construction firm, it should be your top priority to provide all the resources that are necessary to guarantee worker safety. Remember that it is only through this that you can realize the real potential of your firm.
If workers are exposed to every form of accident, you might end up losing the best human resources, while those remaining might work under fear thus not as efficient.
