On Safety Moments, and Trends in Construction Safety

A Message from CII's Safety Community for Business Advancement for Construction Safety Week 2023

During their quarterly meeting, in recognition of Construction Safety Week (May 1-5), CII's Safety CBA members held a roundtable discussion on the benefits of safety moments, and also on the latest trends in construction safety. In this blog post, we share the highlights.

Benefits of Beginning Meetings with a Safety Moment

A significant feature of all CII meetings, whether in person or virtual, is opening with a safety moment that helps our members and their organizations avoid circumstances, or reduce actions, which lead to injuries or death.

Benefits of consistently practicing safety moments at meetings include:

Safety moment can be an ice-breaker and sets the meeting tone.
It sets an immediate focus on keeping participating members safe at work and at home.
By sharing experiences, safety become personal and more relevant.
Safety moments can be used to identify new hazards and new approaches to addressing safety issues.
Safety moments are most effective when people want to offer the meeting's safety moment, and when the presentation is conversational rather than being read from a slide.

Trends in Construction Safety

Current trends in construction safety include:

A growing focus on suicide prevention among people in the construction field. RT-401, Understanding the Mental Health Crisis in the Construction Industry, will report out at the 2023 CII Annual Conference July 31-August 3 in San Antonio.
A stronger focus on construction workers completing safety training before permitted on the worksite.
Construction business owners contractual adherence to “a global construction safety standard.”
An increase in the academic study of safety issues including use of new technologies and the technology worker interface. CII recently hosted a webinar aimed at synthesizing Human-CIS research studies that capture, diagnose, and predict the impacts of human cognitive and task execution behaviors on the safety and efficiency of maintenance workflows.

If you would like to join CII's Safety CBA, please contact Heather Beal at hbeal@cii.utexas.edu.

We wish you all a safe and meaningful Construction Safety Week!

Date posted: April 26, 2023