Top Tips for Construction Site Safety

The HSE places construction sites as the third most hazardous working environment, based on the numbers of near-misses, accidents, injuries, and fatalities each year. 

Recent figures highlight the need for an ongoing focus on improving construction worker safety:

• 61,000 construction workers sustained injuries in 2019/2020
• 81,000 construction workers suffered from work-related ill-health in 2019/20
• There were 40 fatal injuries in 2019/20
• The estimated economic cost of workplace injury and new cases of work-related ill health in construction was £1.2b
• 143 cases were prosecuted and resulted in a conviction

Stay Alert and Be Mindful

Our engineers work on construction, rail, utility and highway sites every day, so ensuring their safety is of the utmost importance.
We have implemented a safe working code of practice developed from years of experience and industry best practices to achieve this. 

Underpinning this code of practice is the need to stay alert and mindful of your surroundings when working in hazardous environments.

We run regular training sessions on how to spot and mitigate internal and external risks, but we wanted to create a safety culture to make this second nature for our team.

That's why we introduced our Safety Observation Report (SOR), a log where engineers can report any accidents, near-misses or unsafe working environments. 

We review this log weekly to see how we can improve safety for our staff and clients, and there is an award for the best submission each month.

We work in environments where vehicles, heavy machinery and unstable surfaces are commonplace, so ensuring our engineers are vigilant of danger at all times is critical - all it takes is one lapse in concentration for an accident to occur.

Before attending any site, we always send our client our Risk Assessment and Method Statement (RAMS) and ensure our team strictly follows these working practices. 

We also regularly attend safety briefings with our clients to better understand the safety challenges they face and how we can support each other in ensuring safety for all.

Wear Appropriate PPE

Effective communication is critical to safe working practices, but this can often be challenging in a noisy construction-driven environment. 

The inability to communicate as a team has the potential to create risks and disrupt workflow. To minimise this danger, we encourage our teams to take extra precautions with their communications to ensure no misunderstandings.

This focuses on our 3 Cs - clarity, conciseness and confirming that everyone has understood what is trying to be communicated. Our engineers will never shout across a site to be heard; they will always come together when interacting.

Their PTS training and ongoing internal efforts reinforce this focus on communications to ensure they are precise with each other and our clients.

Training and Qualifications