About Safety Week
Safety Week is important for Skanska. It helps us re-double our efforts to eliminate accidents in the workplace. It also gives us a chance to do something new together.
In 2008 we started the site safety tours by the senior managers. It proved so successful that we have continued to do them as part of our normal working.
This year we keep focusing on visible leadership. We want you to ask “why?” when you see something unsafe or you see someone acting unsafely. Keep asking “why?” until you get to the real cause of the problem. If we understand why these problems occur we can plan to prevent them.
The second theme for this year’s Safety Week is to improve our planning. Planning has a direct impact on safety. If you look at the charts you can see that 75% of those killed on our worksites had not received a pre-task briefing. Also it is important to involve our subcontractors, as three quarters of those killed were working for them.
This is why the use of task risk assessments and safe job analysis are an important way to reduce accidents on site. Just as important are the safety briefings that are done immediately before the work begins.
So this year we want task risk assessments and pre-task briefing to be done for all high risk activities (e.g. working at height, lifting materials, blasting or working close to vehicles) on our worksites during Safety Week.
Have a great Safety Week 2009!
Noel Morrin
Senior Vice President Sustainability & Green Construction, Skanska