Most safety professionals are always on. Always thinking safety and analyzing everyday things from a different perspective than the average person. This incident came up on my Google Alerts today, yes, I have an alert set for “construction fatality,” and it’s been pinging me more frequently than usual lately.
The most recent incident is in Maine involving a worker in a roadway workzone who was struck and killed by a person driving a company vehicle (of a different employer, most likely not related to the workzone).
I do a lot of insurance risk control work, mostly related to workers compensation, auto liability, and general liability. The incident in Maine is the type of situation that I have in mind when evaluating potential insureds’ risk controls for a carrier.
There’s a lot of things that can kill you at a construction site. If that construction site is on a roadway traveled by the general public, vehicles entering your workzone is the top concern. Workers often feel helpless even after setting up a traffic control plan per the rigorous specifications of the authority they are working for. There’s still that unpredictable factor, the driver.
When I evaluate risk controls, the drivers in question are employees. Companies with fleet safety programs are considered more in tune with their exposures and adequately controlling them. But what keeps me awake is not knowing how well the fleet safety program is implemented. It’s an unknown because you can’t be in the passenger seat with every driver of every company vehicle.
Companies with telematics programs in place, beyond GPS tracking of vehicles, are considered the leaders in fleet safety. Telematics provide real-time information about a driver and the vehicle, which is the next best thing to being in the passenger seat. Every safety professional I’ve spoken to who has telematics deployed at their company raves about the ability to track drivers in real time, often with exception notifications making their phone buzz to alert them to excessive speed, heavy braking, or a vehicle in a location it should not be in.
It almost seems like they sleep better.
What keeps you awake? Is there a way you can leverage technology to help? Do you have a success story?
I too have morbid Google Alerts!
I’d say it’s the ever-creeping “Check-the-boxes & turn the form in to Safety so they’ll quit bugging me” mentality that keeps me awake. We work in such a compliance-driven and regulated environment, it’s hard to get folks to knock out the boring stuff and really take ownership of their own safety.
Yes! I feel that a lot of my time has been spent trying to convince people to care about their own safety… it feels a bit warped sometimes.