At McShane, we abide by the mentality of “Safety First, Last, and Always” on our job sites. This is ingrained in the minds of all our employees and is an expectation made clear to anyone who steps onto our job sites.
As we participate in Construction Safety Week, this is a good time to reflect on safe practices in the construction industry. While having a dedicated safety team is important, this alone is not enough to ensure a safe work site. It is imperative that everyone on site has the training needed to identify and address safety risks.
At McShane, we ensure all employees receive OSHA 30-hour training so they can recognize safety concerns and act on them. Additionally, the safety team engages employees on a regular basis by giving monthly awards to the project teams who perform the most safety audits through our mobile auditing system in each of our regions and by sending monthly safety quizzes to all employees. We also have national and regional safety committees that work to identify concerns on our sites and find solutions.
Our subcontractors and trade workers are the backbone of our projects, and building relationships with them is another crucial factor in keeping our job sites safe. We approach these relationships as a partnership and emphasize open communication so subcontractors know they can trust us and we, in turn, can trust that they will bring concerns to us.
We are proud of our accomplishments as a company as we look back on the past year. We experienced a dramatic increase in man-hours performed on our projects in 2022, which grew from 2.8 million to 4.2 million. Despite this, our overall incident rate remained solid at 0.7 for all our projects and subcontractors around the country, which is far below the national average.
Construction safety practices have come a long way, but there is still always room for improvement. By raising awareness of construction safety and taking steps to educate ourselves and others, we can create a safer industry.