Good News is Worth Sharing

Safety is one of the most basic human motivators, so much so that psychologist Abraham Maslow placed it as a foundational level in his hierarchy of needs. Everyone wants to feel safe. At the end of the workday, everyone wants to return home, unharmed, to their families and loved ones and the things that really matter to them.

Workers in most industries never have to contend with the risk of grievous injury or even death, but construction workers confront this possibility every day. Above all else, Balfour Beatty’s Zero Harm mission is to protect everyone on our jobsites.

Across the US, our project teams are trusted and empowered to invest in the unifying and collective nature of safety, often transcending barriers of language, culture, industry and experience. By taking a holistic approach to safety procedures and conversations, we go beyond Zero Harm and create new opportunities to make projects safer for all.

Safety, Our Common Language

While building the Gihinga Trail Bridge in Rwanda, Balfour Beatty’s Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) team experienced firsthand the unifying ability of collective safety, even across seemingly impassible linguistic gulfs.

Throughout the project, our B2P team worked side-by-side with Rwandan friends and allies who spoke mostly Kinyarwanda. While our teams make an effort every year to learn functional phrases in the language, unifying the entire project team in safety requires a deeper commitment and closer connections.

With daily orientations and a constant emphasis on the principle of “see something, say something,” the team established safety as a collective responsibility. In other words, the team didn’t just make safety a priority, but a foundation on which to build all other decisions so that everyone could return home safely, whether across the bridge or across the ocean.

Thankfully, one of the Kinyarwanda phrases our teammates picked up was the word “Hagarara!” – “STOP!”

Charlotte, North Carolina teammate Michael Smith shouted the word after noticing a significant flaw in a would-be load-bearing steel cable. Not only would it have compromised the finished bridge, but it could have posed a significant safety risk when placed under load during construction. The team replaced the cable and completed the bridge with multiple other instances of corrected safety risks identified by Balfour Beatty personnel and Rwandan teammates alike.

Working together, the team proved that a firm foundation of instilled behaviors – and the mutual trust that all teammates remain rooted in that foundation – ensure any safety concerns are met with swift and decisive action.

Safety, Our Foundation

“Safety First” is a common phrase, but its premise is flawed from the start by placing safety at the head of a list of priorities. After all, priorities are set, maintained and met by regular people, and as such are subject to change with circumstances. Instead, Balfour Beatty believes safety is our duty to each other and a license of doing business – an absolute foundation to our identity and integral to the way we think and operate.

Transcending priorities to create foundations, taking safety seriously on a personal level, requires equally personal commitment. Every teammate must take ownership of jobsite safety and believe that safety is not a destination. It’s not a place we can reach, a goal we can accomplish or an item we can check off a list. Rather, it’s our constant, tireless and cumulative effort to establish ownership, create awareness of every action and anticipate the consequences of every action.

Encouraging individual ownership and proactive attention is of course complicated by the incredible diversity on our jobsites. Scores of individual trades, teammates of varying backgrounds and even various languages interact in close proximity on every project. But just as in Rwanda, safety becomes a collective mission and safe outcomes a shared destiny through the conduit of individual relationships.

“Safe decisions are built on relationships cultivated in an atmosphere of trust, accountability and leadership,” says Richard Ryan, Balfour Beatty senior vice president of safety. “We train our project and safety leaders to build personal relationships with our workers and trade partners, not just relationships built on compliance and adherence.”

In an atmosphere of trust, people feel comfortable and confident speaking up when they observe potential safety risks. Even more, they believe that their concerns will be listened to and taken seriously as good faith contributions to the collective safety mission even with language barriers present, differences in experience and commitments to accelerated schedules. And if each teammate makes choices to protect their own safety, they also build a safer project for all.

Looking Beyond Numbers

As a matter of scale, safety analysis necessarily relies on metrics and statistics. Across all US operations, Balfour Beatty logs more than three million work hours every month. Limiting work hours to numbers quickly becomes sterile and impersonal, but that figure represents hour by hour accumulations of dangerous work by real people – excavations 60 feet below grade, delivering urban apartments hundreds of feet in the air, building bridges over water and more. Any one of those hours, any one of our teammates or partners, could be impacted by a safety incident.

When incidents do occur, analysis still largely focuses on the numbers, including Recordable Incident Rates (RIR), Lost Time Incident Rates (LTIR) and more, but a rate only indicates that something happened, not the deeper story behind it.

Nor do incident rates account for the times that our collective safety controls work as intended and a teammate notices a potential risk, notifies project leaders and the risk is corrected before it can cause incident or injury. Just like every such situation the B2P team encountered, these safety victories can evade the most scrutinized incident statistics but certainly represent the best capabilities of our Zero Harm mission and commitment to protecting each other.

Safety is Universal and Unifying

The B2P team began with a foundational principle and infused that principle into everything that followed, and our teams across the US strive for the same. Our projects contain diverse multitudes of people with different languages, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, trades, individual priorities and experience levels, but all share one thing in common: a desire to return home safely. On every project, safety is both universal and unifying, providing our teammates with a common language and a common foundation for safe choices.