Hi, my name is Paul Haining. I'm from Skanska USA, and I'm here today to talk about environmental health and safety in construction. The construction industry right now is really at a crossroads or evolution. I think across the industry we realize that we must make a change on how we approach health and safety and how we protect the environment, and various different forms of construction across the world. If we look at current state, current performance, and relate that back to the last 20 years, we really haven't improved, we really haven't made any significant headway in improving the safety performance in construction. That's underground, elevated, any form of construction whether it be infrastructure or buildings or infrastructure or commercial development projects also. If we look at the statistics, we on average over the last 20 years kill between 700 and 800 people in the United States. And again that statistic is completely unacceptable. When you compare that to other situations in the world, we actually kill more people consistently over the last 20 years in comparison to active service in the US military. Again, something that needs to change. So how do we get there? How do we move the industry forward? I think ultimately, we must realize that, and actually we have a problem and something that we need to fix as an industry, not only as one company or one or two companies trying to make a significant improvement. We need the full industry to be together to join us in this effort to improve our stewardship of our people and the environment. So we wanna aim and wanna set our sites really high. We wanna aim to have an injury-free environment and construction, where everybody goes home to the family in the same condition or in better condition than they arrived to work that day. So where are we today? Again, we must realize and accept that we have a problem before we can make any way to fix it, let alone get into strategies, systems, processes. So we ask the question of ourselves also, where are you today as an individual because we need every individual in the industry to move this initiative forward. So that recognition has to be all-inclusive with everybody involved making that effort. This graph displays Skanska's journey over the last 12 years. So this is indicative of Skanska's efforts in the US relative to OSHA recordable rates, relative to OSHA lost time rates. And again, injuries that fall into specific classification bucket, and determined by OSHA. So this is pretty much what you will see from any major company in the US. And actually when we started to make some efforts to move forward and try to strategize how we can improve and improve our safety performance, we made the initial headway with compliance with systems and processes. We've moved on to behavior-based models, but over the last four, five years we've pretty much plateaued. And I've shared this graph and other colleagues in the industry are pretty much at the same level, same situation where we've plateaued and we're really struggling to move to the next level. A road to success, when you compare it to safety program elements I mentioned earlier, complains through the system and processes. So ultimately we are looking at engineering controls, we've moved forward towards processes and systems trying to control that obvious risk on our construction sites. We then move them to our training mode where we realize that we need to educate our leaders, we need to educate our staff, we need to educate the craft worker on the front line. And improve their competency levels to one, make them more aware. And two, make them more in tune with some of the controls that we can apply to mitigate that risk. We've since moved on to a cultural and behavior human-based approach where we try to connect the core value meaning behind some of the initiatives that we've applied previously, not just avoid citations or to have ourselves be compliant to the law. We want to move beyond that, we want to make that personal connection with err relationship to safety and what it means to us as a company and what it means to the individual and those family members. So again, ultimately moving towards an energy free environment as the ultimate goal. So as we moved through these periods of time again over the last 10, 12 years, really when we started to put some of these initiatives in place, how did attitudes and behaviors change as we moved through this process? When we're in the stage of implementing engineering controls, the attitude would be, well, we really don't have to do this, I really am being forced to do it. I am on board with processes, but I really don't get the core value of the meaning behind it. Then we move then to management systems and processes where we start to measure engagement. Then now that you kind of change towards well, I'd better do this because it's being measured, I'm gonna be held accountable. Moving towards when we, and for our people, when we raise that level of competency, we start to be driven, internally driven and self-motivated because we're starting to make some core value connections. When we move them to cultural analysis and cultural gap analysis and we make the realization that we need to pull together as a team. And we're driven as teams, we consolidate and really had a mass drive towards improvement and environmental health and safety. And then we pretty much are getting to the stage right now where we need a leadership approach. And that doesn't mean that the corporate level professional as a one drive in the full program. That means that everybody becomes a leader, from the craft worker on the front line, right through to the CEO and everybody is unified in our drive towards an injury-free environment. So again, as we've gone through these processes, injury rates have gone down. But what we have seen also that the workforce and the company internally has become healthier, happier, and safer as we've transgressed through these different stages of our evolution. So where's our opportunity? The opportunity as an industry, as I mentioned earlier, really is to learn and lead in safety and really share those learning experiences with our competitors, with industry, with our clients, with trade unions, with every person involved in the delivery of construction in the US and worldwide. That's where we really need to be setting our goals, and that is the opportunity for the industry moving forward. So I mentioned earlier that we must have a realization that we do actually have a problem initially before we can start to fix it. So we mentioned some of the systems and processes earlier. But my personal feeling that's led us to create a blind spot where we think that when we measure leading indicators we openly discuss our lessons learned through the fatalities or serious incidents or near misses. We've analyzed and managed lost time incident cases, and we've got processes to help get people back to work and return to work programs. We have some leadership engagement and executive site safety visits. We manage cases better, we analyze statistics and lagging indicators. So to think that we've got it all covered by some of these basics, we really believe that that's brought us to this stage where we have created a blind spot. We need to look beyond the blind spot. We need to look to some of the underlying issues that we need to address. We need to create an atmosphere or a climate on our projects where collaboration is ultimate, there's a sense of belonging, there's a relationship between the staff and the front line workers. There's this core value that bonds that team, those core value beliefs that we can achieve excellence, safety excellence. And we can achieve zero, and we ultimately are compelled to get there as a team through genuine care, through concern for each other, and an environment of trust and friendship. And again making that relationship, as a family, a work family, I'm extending that back to home. So there's more of a holistic core value feeling that we really need to be driving to enable us to achieve injury-free environment.
