Construction work is dangerous without the proper guidelines in place. Monitoring health and safety in your building site is paramount. Follow this advice to do it effectively.
When your industry is the building and construction trade, there are so many things that can go wrong. Accidents in the workplace can prove fatal. When you are working with heavy machinery and robust materials day after day, you are at higher risk of injury.
The International Labor Organization estimates there are 60,000 fatalities every year on construction sites. Whether you are the project manager or the site owner, you have a duty of care to anyone on your land or project. That duty of care is the same as in any other workplace. Your employees have the right to safe working practices.
Why Safety Matters in Construction
When you first start planning your big building project, it is far too easy to become carried away. You want to plan the space, buy your fixtures and fittings, and hire sub-contractors, all in one go. To many new projects, managers or building site owners overlook construction safety in their eagerness to get going.
Safety matters in construction. To govern it securely, you need to outline your workplace safety procedures. These help you keep a neat, tidy site, and identify hazards. Construction safety procedures help you plan for accidents and follow local government guidelines. It also protects you as an employer should an inspection arise.
How to Implement Work Safety Procedures on Your Construction Site
The best way to easily implement work safety procedures on your building site is with a construction health and safety checklist. You should do this from the moment you start planning your project. You should integrate your workplace safety procedures into your building project from the outset.
Make sure to include any welding safety plan and check services that can provide details about r stamp welding and other safety standards to ensure maximum safety on your construction site. Doing so will protect your workers from injuries and your business against any legal liabilities arising from workplace accidents.
A good construction site safety checklist might cover:
- Your demands for and provision of Personal Protective Equipment
- Training and onboarding safety talks
- What makes a tidy site and storage instructions for equipment
- Safe use, monitoring, and maintenance of building equipment
- Hazard assessments and strategies
- Identification of unsafe working conditions and areas
- Your system for reporting faults or defects
Furthermore, monitoring concrete as it cures is also crucial to employee and project safety. It detects cracking, shrinkage, and other curing flaws that could injure workers. It ensures timeliness and employee safety. Additionally, it prevents costly repairs caused by undetected issues during curing.
The Importance of Hazard Identification
Risk assessments are one of the top things you can learn to perform to keep your construction site safe. The process relies on you identifying hazards along every step of your construction project. Hazards might be the machinery you use, how you store tools, or a crowded work area.
Each job will have individual hazards. It is important to perform a risk assessment on each new job before you perform it. You should also perform a risk assessment for all the existing tasks within your organization.
Keeping these documents helps protect you in a legal sense. If one of your workers has an accident and you already planned for that accident, you suffer less fault.
How to Use Risk Assessment as a Tool to Design Safety Procedures
Performing risk assessments on all areas of your construction project will allow you to define your workplace safety procedures. Examine each task for potential harm, evaluate that risk, and prepare your workers for the risk. If you need to prepare your workers about a risk on your site, you must design a safety procedure that covers that risk.
