The Relationship Between Construction Safety and Experience Modification Rate

What combination of individuals on a certain job gives you the optimal balance of talent, efficiency and safety?

If you knew this number for all your employees over the past five years, what would you do differently?

Moneyball Comes to Construction Safety

Brad Pitt's Oscar-nominated movie, Moneyball, is a story about looking at the same set of data and coming to different conclusions than everyone else. It's a story about leaders having the conviction to veer away from the way it's always been done. In Moneyball, Pitt's Oakland A's bottom line for evaluating talent was their ability to get on base. They understood there were 27 outs per game. Outs were finite, limited, precious. Players who made the fewest outs were going to play - somewhere. Despite the logic, it was heresy in the early 2000's.

In a hyper-competitive construction market with razor thin margins, your bottom line is, well, your bottom line. If you are paying higher premiums because your people get injured more often than your competitors, your cost of doing business is higher.

You can lower your cost of doing business by making every employee accountable for safety. Not just their own safety but everyone on the job.

This two-step program is far from a pre-packaged solution. There are lots of holes in the argument. But don't get defensive: Consider this a formal challenge. A challenge to create individual accountability for safety.

Imagine for a moment, it's the year 2017 and we have a +/- stat for every employee. They carry it around with them like a construction-grade batting average. It's a mathematical reflection of the likelihood of someone - anyone - getting injured or killed on the job while he is there.

How did we do it? What obstacles were overcome?

We continually talk about developing a "Culture of Safety," how we must look out for the safety of others. Then why not track it? What gets measured gets done....

So dump EMR today in favor of the R.I.D. Rate. The language change alone will generate positive safety chatter. Then start a discussion about how we can develop an individual +/- Safety stat for every employee. Your bottom line and employees' lives are on the line.

And if the Oakland A's can do it… why can't you?

Bradley Hartmann is el presidente and founder of Red Angle - a Spanish language training firm focused exclusively on the construction industry. He can be reached at bradley@redanglespanish.com and www.redanglespanish.com.