Chris Rongstad’s introduction to construction nearly 30 years ago did not leave him with the best first impression of the industry’s safety standards. Long before he found his current position as the Director of Safety at Cache Valley Electric, his first employer out of high school fired him after he dropped a bucket of cement from a two-story ladder he’d expressed concern about climbing.

But times have changed. Today, Rongstad said, the conversation throughout the industry has shifted away from viewing safety as a requirement at best and a punishment at worst. Leading companies in Utah have integrated safety training and inspections into their daily workflow, helping to avoid accidents and increase productivity. The definition of safety has also expanded beyond handling equipment properly to include conversations about stress reduction, fatigue, and general wellness.

“The safety profession overall has been quite dynamic over the past ten years and changed more to a risk-based focus rather than just nuts and bolts safety,” said Mark Chavez, Corporate Director of Risk and Safety for Okland Construction. “I think that’s because nuts and bolts were the challenges in the ‘70s–‘90s [now] have been mostly taken care of. You don’t see a lot of people not wearing hard hats or high visibility clothing anymore […] and now we’re seeing what else we are talking about.”

Building up Basics

While safety basics may have taken a back seat to risk factors in recent years, there is one area of risk where teaching the basics remains of utmost importance: the sheer number of new and inexperienced employees currently entering the construction workforce. 

But the influx of new workers also represents an opportunity to train staff in basic safety measures from the ground up, said Nate Neal, Safety Director for WW Clyde. Part of that training in his company involves testing all new employees on their capabilities before sending them to a job site and then supplies assignments or training as needed to enable that employee to be successful in the future.

WW Clyde also has a new effort in the works to provide more classroom training for employees—new and old alike. To cater to the younger audience, Neal said, staff receives a stipend or company-issued smartphone to watch “microtrainings” at home.

“Say I have an issue with crash cushions on the freeway,” Neal said. “I can go out, shoot a two-minute video with the highlights and dangers and who to get ahold of for help, and it will go out to the whole company that afternoon.”

The heavy emphasis on training has the added benefit, Neal said, of attracting a higher-end clientele for the heavy civil contractor. Tech companies often will require workers on their projects to have ten years of earthwork experience plus their OSHA trainer card and certification from the Board of Certified Safety Persons.

“Well, those people are like the needle in the haystack. Not only can you not find them, but you probably can’t afford them,” Neal said. So instead, he said, WW Clyde trains them and offers the chance to take part in these high-end projects as they learn. As employees build their experience, the company sends them for courses and exams with OSHA and the Board of Certified Safety Persons. 

So while the worker shortage may be a symptom of the current economy, Neal said he doesn’t see this emphasis on training changing anytime soon.

“It’s something the industry took for granted, and now we are finding all our experienced people are getting old and retiring,” he said, “so we have to maintain this training standard from now on.”

Individual Responsibility

Even with a renewed focus on training, Neal found that was not enough to reduce accidents in the field. What has made the difference, he said, is pushing a company culture that expects accountability for safety on an individual, project-by-project level.

What this means at Cache Valley Electric, Rongstad said, is that rather than holding separate meetings and initiatives to address safety, the company now starts every day with a pretask meeting where the project’s crew stretches and discusses the safety aspects of each particular job. These meetings give employees space to discuss whether they will need help, for example, moving a heavy wire spool, or if they have adequate tools and PPE to complete the day’s tasks.

“Operational ownership of safety is the key,” Chavez agreed. “When they own safety, they integrate that into their construction site. If we talk about scheduling, the schedulers are integrating safety into their schedule. When you’re talking to the estimators, they’re integrating safety into the cost of the project. Then the actual execution—the laborers, technicians, electricians—they integrate that into their daily planning rather than having a bolt-on, ‘Oh, we have to talk about safety too.’”

Chavez has found it more effective to use “sugar instead of a stick” by recognizing and rewarding employees for safe behavior. If safety is only discussed when someone has done something wrong, he said, staff may come to view safety as something negative. This led Okland in 2016 to change the way they recorded and measured the company’s safety performance. Instead of recording negative incidents such as injuries and accidents, the company now tracks trainings, inspections, observations of safe behavior, and other similar metrics. Employees can log these metrics via an internal system, and superintendents must make at least five safety “observations”—positive or negative—to retain their safety bonuses.

“It’s created a visible, felt change on our projects,” Chavez said. “Safety is not looked at as something on a negative scale, but as something that is benefiting the projects.”



Fit for Duty

As job site safety has improved, it has also drawn attention to how conditions at home can affect a worker’s performance on the job, Rongstad said. Fatigue, stress, illness, and even accidents at home can lead to missed work hours or additional incidents. 

Reducing exposure to extreme heat and humidity is currently one area attracting attention across the industry, Neal said. More companies now pay attention to providing not only water but also options like popsicles and sports drinks for electrolytes, Neal said. Increases in the heat index at the job site prompt actions such as shade breaks.

Extreme heat can be particularly dangerous for new workers, Rongstad said, requiring acclimation periods and training to detect and prevent heat exhaustion.

“That’s a big factor too with the heat coming on—making sure our crews are getting plenty of sleep,” he said. “You can’t force people, but understanding the consequences that can happen when you’re working in 110-degree weather and the night before you were drinking alcohol or energy drinks. That can be a big factor the next day because you can get heat exhaustion really easily.”

Paying attention to employees’ overall sense of fatigue and stress has also become critical in light of the growing number of suicides in the industry, Neal said, prompting WW Clyde to implement a company wellness initiative they call “fit for duty.”

More people are dying “through mental health than through construction-related accidents,” he said. “People’s finances, people’s relationships, the state of the country. The world’s a more stressful place than it used to be.”

Okland, Chavez said, has instituted a tracking program that flags when workers have already worked more than 55 hours per week in an effort to reduce stress and burnout from overworking. While it can be easy in construction for workers to feel as though they need to put in more hours to make up for smaller teams and labor shortages, Chavez said the tracker has enabled them to distribute workforce resources in a more balanced manner.

“That’s one of the key things: being able to track [hours]. You don’t know where you are without tracking it,” Chavez said. “If you don’t, pretty soon you’re 3–4 months into the project and one guy is worn out and ready to quit and move on.”

Cache Valley Electric is also encouraging staffers to take more time off work, particularly in the event of illness, Rongstad said. In the past, he said, employees who missed work while they were sick might have been seen as weak, but Covid-19 has highlighted the impact a single sick worker can have on the rest of their team.

And while the emphasis on overall health and safety has reduced the number of accidents on-site and increased productivity, Rongstad said the greatest benefit might be the message it conveys to the staff about the importance of their welfare to the company.

“These are the kinds of things that show [employees that their employers] do care about me,” Rongstad said. “That they do understand that it’s important for me to come home every day.”