by Shane Henson — September 16, 2013—One of the keys to preventing accidents during construction lies in construction personnel and management talking about safety before work begins and including various safety requirements in the contract documents, according to authors of a peer-reviewed article published in the September issue of Professional Safety, the American Society of Safety Engineers’ (ASSE) journal.
In the article, Contract Issues and Construction Safety Management, the authors report on a survey of construction and safety professionals that identifies the most common contract issues related to safety management and the frequency and severity of contract issues relative to worker safety on construction sites.
“Often times safety professionals spend all of their time and energy on construction safety after the fact,” explained the article’s co-author, Brian Clarke. “If safety professionals can get involved in contract discussions up front, they can engineer out the safety problem before the project starts.”
When a construction contract has too many ambiguities, its language can be subject to interpretation of what the parties agreed to during early negotiations, notes the article. The most common contract aspects of contract disputes are said to be cost, quality, schedule and safety. Clarke and article co-authors Sathy Rajendran and Michael Whelan reveal that the survey of construction safety professionals and project managers showed that 4.8 percent of company contract disputes could be attributed to safety management issues.
Safety professionals employ several strategies recommended in the article to help eliminate contract issues. These include compiling a checklist of safety issues to help contract managers and safety professionals remember to include appropriate items in the final contract; becoming involved with a client’s marketing department early in the process to avoid commitment of unrealistic or unnecessary safety resource levels in attempt to win a project; having the owner clearly communicate safety expectations for the project for proper resource allocation; and active participation in the request for proposal process as well as all pre-bid, pre-award, contract mobilization and craft orientation meetings.
“Bring on the safety professional early so we can go through the documents,” Clarke added. “If a safety professional communicates clearly and honestly from the very beginning of a project’s contract phase, the safety concerns will go down significantly.”
