A Case Study of Gilbane Building Co.

Safety Week 2015

Gilbane Building Co. is an internationally recognised construction company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. They are one of many high-profile companies taking part in Safety Week 2015 between the 3rd and the 9th of May.

Safety Week aims to achieve a greater awareness within the construction industry of safety issues with a view to cutting down the number of workplace injuries and fatalities each year. There is a growing recognition that safety initiatives need now to be both root and branch. Contractors on the ground need be fully backed by management in their pursuit of safe work methods.

Gilbane is standing squarely behind Safety Week and is seen as a leader in the adoption of technology to ensure the safety of its workforce. Billy Gilbane III joined other industry leaders from the likes of Limbach and Skanska to launch the week of awareness last Monday.

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New Models of Training

Gilbane, a three-time member of Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work” and 11-time member of Training Magazine’s Top 125 is always looking for new steps and processes that will further enhance its safety practice which is how it has ended up partnering with software company, GoContractor, to deliver orientation training on some of its projects.

The challenge for most construction companies is now, as it always has been, how to ensure all workers are correctly trained and tested for the work that they are to do. When managing large scale projects where training must be delivered for multiple locations, roles and languages construction companies could be forgiven for feeling daunted.

According to Pat Conlon, the Project Executive on a project for a large telecoms company, “Gilbane’s number one priority on all of our sites is safety. GoContractor gives us control over the first steps contractors take to become safe and knowledgeable members of our workforce. Now we have a robust orientation and registration process that ensures No Orientation = No Work Badge.”

As technology has improved it is now possible for Gilbane to build and deliver training programs to a granular level without ever having to leave the office. Coupled with auto-reader functionality of training materials into trainee languages they can now ensure total compliance and control of the training product.

Leave no-one behind

What is interesting is that Gilbane has brought its sub-contractors with it on this journey. The technology allows for sub-contractors to sign up their workers to be trained online in advance. This model of bringing all parties involved in a project into the ‘safety fold’ is one that Gilbane can be seen to be pioneering. In this way nobody is left behind and even small scale contractors can now gain access to cutting edge training methods.

Of course, construction is a physical industry and there will always remain ‘on-the-job’ training components on worksites. However, the administration and training workload nowadays can be significantly reduced.

Seen in the context of the recent OSHA report into workplace injuries that cited the startling statistic of a U.S. construction worker being 4 times more likely to be killed at work than their U.K. counterpart* it is companies like Gilbane that will lead the way to safer work practices in the industry at large.

*OSHA: Adding Inequality to Injury

Image sources: Shutterstock and New York City Hall

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