Travis Althouse shares his advice on improving safety in the field.
Safety training may seem tedious, and you may wonder if any of it will ever apply to you, but anybody who has spent significant time in industry will tell you to pay attention! It’s not only about your safety, but the safety of everyone else around you. You never know when you may be the hero that someone needs when something goes awry on site!
I speak from experience: I was once saved by someone with years of experience as a carpenter. I’d had some improper training on cutting drywall (the subject of another blog post), and wound up over-cutting with a box knife and slicing my arm.
Thanks to the biannual training the carpenter had received during decades at his company, he knew exactly how to react. He sprang into action, first applying first aid, then getting help. His quick action and decision-making certainly saved me from much more extreme consequences.
The funny part of the story is that we were working directly above the ER wing in the hospital! But most times you’re not so lucky, and that initial first aid is literally a lifesaver.
Accidents happen every single day in our industry, and often to people who think it will never happen to them. We all have to be prepared when working in hazardous places. Proper preparation is not just training, but also having the proper access to safety materials, forms, and so on.
It can be really hard to remember how to react in an emergency, and you don’t usually have easy access to a safety manual, or the time to flip through it. We’re much more used to relying on digital devices, because our phones and other devices are so portable and convenient. And when it comes to sharing information, many processes now rely on digitization for easy sharability and distribution.
When you add a digital component to your safety process, you can easily share out procedures, forms, contact lists, and so on - and it’s always ready to go for anyone on the team, at any time. Even better, when you use a tool like DADO, you can also use your voice to quickly find what you’re looking for.
So in the case of a major emergency, rather than googling what to do, or calling around, we’d be better off grabbing our phones, and voice searching for the relevant information in our digital safety manual.
DADO’s sharing structure means you can package up safety materials specific to certain jobsites. Imagine the convenience of specific contacts and forms needed for a job, all dropped in one place and made accessible by phone!
If you want to make general safety procedures and forms more accessible, you can set up a general project that’s super easy to distribute. You could even include review forms with questions on them to follow up on training, and submit those back through DADO to track who’s has completed which training sessions.
Safety is everyone’s job onsite, and everyone can be a safety hero. Let DADO enable safety superpowers with your team, and give this workflow a try!
Interested in uploading your safety documents to distribute and navigate with your teams? Please get in touch!