A Tool for Continuous Safety Management and Safety Climate Improvement

Over the last two decades, it has become clear to construction companies and safety practitioners that a company’s safety record comes down to the climate that it has onsite. “Safety climate” – defined as the shared understanding among workers regarding what is reward, expected, valued and reinforced at the jobsite with respect to safety – is directly associated with the numbers of injuries and their outcomes. To strengthen a company’s safety climate, it needs to improve its safety management practices, policies, and procedures used on the jobsite.

To help companies, particularly those with fewer personnel and financial resources, effectively carry out these activities, CPWR – The Center for Construction Research and Training (www.cpwr.com) – created the Safety Climate-Safety Management Information System or SC-SMIS (www.scsmis.org). It is an easy-to-use, interactive web-based system that any company can use, at no cost, to: 

• Measure jobsite safety climate across eight leading indicators using CPWR’s reliable and valid safety climate assessment tools.
• Download evidence-based safety management policies, procedures, guidelines, and templates from a large resource repository to strengthen low-scoring indicators. All ninety resources are available in English and Spanish and formatted in Microsoft Word or Power Point so companies can tailor them to their specific needs. 
• Develop a Plan to put the selected resources into action, keep track of current and completed plans, and schedule reminders to conduct future assessments for continuous safety climate and safety management improvement.