Todd Friis is proud of Clayco’s safety record, but he’s not easily satisfied.
The Chicago-based contractor announced June 26 an Experience Modification Rate of 0.4. A metric used by insurers to measure company safety, the EMR industry average is 1.0, and lower than that indicates an above average safety record, while also directly affecting a firm’s workers’ compensation rate.
Even so, Friis, senior vice president of risk management at Clayco, acknowledged safety is a tireless effort, especially when it comes to training those new to the trades.
“Safety is like anything else, you got so many things going on in your life, if somebody isn’t getting the important thing in front of you, it just kind of goes to the back of your mind,” Friis said. “So, we’ve got to tactfully figure out how to keep the safety pieces, the important things to the front.”
Here, Friis talks with Construction Dive about defining success, getting follow-through from subcontractors and training effectively with workers’ shrinking attention spans.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: How do you define success when it comes to safety?
TODD FRIIS: Well, I’m pretty critical myself, but as a company — representing Clayco — I think at the end of the day, we want people to just feel safe. Period.
To me, the ultimate compliment from either our own people or clients or subcontractors is when they say, “Well, we’ve been with Clayco, or we worked on a Clayco project, and it’s not like anything I’ve never experienced.” And we hear that quite frequently. Then I’ll ask for some specifics, and they’re like, “You’ll really do what you say you’re going to do.”
Todd Friis
Courtesy of Clayco
We have a specific glove requirement, for example, and a helmet requirement and all the pretty basic stuff. Whereas a lot of GCs or other companies, they’ll say they do it, but they don’t really hold their workers to it or they only do it when it’s convenient. We actually hold people to it in a good way — not in a punitive way necessarily.
What kind of technology does Clayco use to help with safety practices?
Clayco uses drone footage, BIM 360, ACC Build and our Work-Safe app to help with safety practices. The Work-Safe app is a digital safety documentation platform Clayco has built in-house with our IT development team.
Launched in March 2022 and available on phones, tablets and computers, the platform replaces traditional paper forms used in the field, making safety documentation easier for our employees and trade partners, while helping us collect and quantify data. The data helps us identify best practices and potential issues.
Currently, the Work-Safe app supports:
- Worker profiles/subcontractor management via an online form subcontractor workers fill out when they start a project that includes emergency contacts and training certifications. This information can travel with workers from one project to another, preventing the need to fill out new paperwork and start from scratch with each new assignment. This information can also be managed by the project team.
- Boots in the Field Safety Observation — this involves documenting behavioral observations on site during the workday in a uniform manner, identifying best practices and potential issues.
- Incident reporting allows for collection of incident information from the field in a uniform manner that helps us quantify/identify trends that shape our safety program.
- Document access so that users can search our system for written safety programs and forms from wherever they are.
At Clayco, we determine the best tech to use by constantly innovating when we see a need and staying current on best practices within the industry.
What methods do you use to ensure safety requirements aren’t just followed when it’s convenient?
It starts up in the pre-planning selection of our subcontractors. We pre-qualify all our subcontractors. So getting the right subcontractors on board in the beginning is very important. And hiring our own people obviously, too, making sure they understand that when you work at Clayco, safety is definitely the most important thing. Then when they come to the project, knowing also contractually that they will be held accountable for those safety items.
And also we’re going to recognize people for doing things really well and doing it the right way. Our approach is more to coach, teach and recognize people for doing things right. Because we can’t run everybody off of projects. We need people, we want them to learn. We want them to get better and safer. And that’s the only way to do it.
How do you make the most of that time investing in training and planning, especially for people new to construction?
We do feel like more time is necessary for people new to the industry. In our case, since 95% of the work is done by subcontractors, we rely heavily on them. And if they’re a union company, the union should be providing a lot of the training. So that covers a lot of it.
But we still see a lot of people come to our projects that just are not experienced at all. They just don’t know how to use hand tools properly. So we spend more time with those people. We talk about it, but in a quick way, because we really don’t have a ton of time when we bring people through our orientations. Again, I’m speaking specifically about subcontractors now. We’re trying to get their attention quickly. And these days, it’s really hard to get people’s attention.
I know my attention span is different than it was 10 years ago. If you don’t grab people right away, they’re going on something else.
What do you do to educate while working around reduced attention spans?
So, we use something called safety alerts, which are incidents that have happened in the past. Not graphic things, but things that people can relate to. Like, a person was using a drill and it got stuck and twisted their wrist. Things like that that people can realize not to do it that way.
I think we’ve got to figure out how to do micro learning even better as far as an area of opportunity, in my opinion, because that’s what people gravitate toward. That’s what most people do now. If it’s more than two minutes, maybe five, if you’re lucky, people are just not going to pay attention to it. So we’re really trying to improve in that area and keep information fresh.
