Why Your Contracting Business Needs Safety Checklists

When you’ve been doing the same tasks for more than a decade, it’s often hard to make yourself keep going through the same safety checks. If you have completed a job accurately and without injury 100 times, you obviously know what you’re doing, right? But there’s a reason all these rules and checklists exist. People who have been working in a construction field for decades can still be injured or even killed on the job. Sometimes, experience can make injury even more likely. Here’s why.

How Risky Is the Construction Industry?

Any industry that calls for the use of heavy lifting and big equipment is likely to have some injuries and fatalities, and construction is no exception. Every year, about 1,000 people in the U.S. construction industry will die on the job. That might not seem like a lot when you consider that there are almost 7.5 million construction workers nationwide. However, this is cold comfort when it happens to you or someone you know. Statistically, you’re more likely to sustain a fatal injury in construction if you are 25-34 years old, work in a business with less than 10 employees, or work for yourself.

Even if dying on the job is still extremely rare, injuries are not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that about 150,000 construction workers report an injury each year. There are probably many more who receive a minor injury they do not report, so these numbers should give you pause for concern.

Why Is Safety Important for a Contracting Business?

This might seem like a question with a really obvious answer, but there are all kinds of factors involved with your business’s operation in relation to safety. Of course you don’t want to get injured or sick based on your work environment. You don’t want your employees in that situation, either. Here’s a few ways that lack of attention to safety guidelines can hit your bottom line:

• lost productivity
• inability to meet deadlines
• having to find and hire temporary workers to replace someone who is injured
• watching your insurance rates go up if you have to make a claim
• possible liability for failure to create a safe work environment

The biggest thing to remember is that most of these problems are avoidable, and it may not even be that difficult.

How Do Safety Checklists Help?

In order to perform your job safely, you need to know what to do. Safety checklists make it easy for people to follow the rules correctly every time. Logically, there are basically five reasons that people get injured on the job:

1. They don’t know how to be safe on a particular task.
2. Safety equipment and procedures are not readily available.
3. They know what to do, but forgot to do it.
4. They deliberately ignored safety procedures.
5. They did everything correctly but there was a failure at another stage of the process.

We’d all like to think injuries only happen for the fifth reason, but evidence suggests otherwise. When you compare the most likely causes of injury and death in construction with the 10 OSHA standards people are most likely to violate, there’s a strong correlation. If people followed safety procedures for fall protection, hazardous energy and personal protective equipment, they’d avoid most injuries and fatalities.

Are There Ways to Monitor Safe Practices?

The good news is that you’re not on the hook to create most of your own safety checklists. OSHA has this covered with a wide variety of standards that you can set up for yourself and your employees. Put the checklists and PPE in a convenient place, so people are less likely to forget. Following the rules when you’ve been working in the field awhile can take time to build the habit. Be sure to model good compliance for people working under you. Consider using apps to allow people to check off items from a device without needing a paper nearby.

Avoiding injuries on the construction site starts with safety checklists that you can follow every time you perform a particular task. You can complement your work with the right education. To start building a career as a contractor, visit CSLS today!