Gilbane Building Company leverages a multi-pronged Safety Program for all of its project employees—more than 65 percent of the company—that targets increasing participants’ knowledge of safe practices, skills in how to perform and direct work safely, and establishing Gilbane Cares core values through everything employees do.
Program Details
This training program is established in accordance with direction from Gilbane’s corporate head of Safety and is attended, marketed, and, in some instances, facilitated by its CEO and other C-suite members. The program leverages multi-modal delivery and consistent reinforcement to ensure a continuous focus on developing employees’ ability to work safely.
The program consists of:
- Incident and Injury Free (IIF): This is a series of in-person sessions with zippering across all levels of the organization. All project employees attend IIF Orientation to ground them in the behavioral principles that lead to everyone going home safe. Deeper dives are provided for those overseeing onsite work (Supervising IIF in Action), managing third parties (IIF Commitment Workshop), and aligning at the executive level (IIF Leadership Safety Alignment).
- Implementing and Overseeing Safe Work: After establishing the core expectations and behaviors that lead to safe work, employees are provided access to a variety of resources on what constitutes safe work, the personal protective equipment (PPE) that is needed, and the regulations that must be followed. The in-person Maintaining a Safe Jobsite course sets all Gilbane employees above OSHA requirements and safety protocols. Employees then have access to a catalog containing more than 1,000 courses on safe work across a variety of different construction methods, tools, and practices.
The Safety Program leverages courses from JMJ, Click Safety, and Gilbane’s in-house developed materials. The multi-modal delivery approach ensures a mix of high-impact in-person learning events and on-demand access to learning at the time of need, supplemented with ongoing reinforcement.
Each month, a division of the company leads a call attended by the entire organization that focuses on best-in-class practices for safe work. This learning event gives project teams the ability to share their techniques, tools, and methods for ensuring work is done safely on Gilbane’s jobsites each day. These mandatory virtual sessions are accompanied by supporting materials and in-depth Q&A. Action items are followed up on via all-company e-mail communications.
Results
Through the behaviors reinforced by this program, Gilbane has seen a 71 percent decrease in the total number of OSHA recordable cases on its jobsites. In addition, the number of OSHA cases on jobsites involving lost-time incidents has been decreasing since 2018. This has culminated in a Gilbane employee lost-time incident rate of 0.00 in 2020 vs. 0.11 in 2018 and 0.07 in 2019.
