Riley takes ground up (and air) approach to safety

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Riley Construction goes to great lengths to keep its employees safe. Sometimes they go to great heights, too, in a helicopter.

Jim Janquart, a senior safety specialist with the contractor, said the company works to integrate safety into each part of a project.

Safety professionals work with estimators early in a project, for instance, to see if the company needs to include the price of scaffolding or other equipment into a bid. Kickoff meetings at the beginning of the job walk through each part of a particular project and consider points that could pose the greatest risk to worker safety.

Meetings every six weeks throughout the job attempt to identify hazardous or high-risk parts of a job, and find the safest-possible process for executing the work.

“One of the reasons we’re successful at safety is that we integrate it throughout our company,” Janquart said.

It was through Riley’s safety planning process that the company realized that using a helicopter — instead of a crane — would be the safest way to install roof-top mechanical units on a particular project.

So project leaders drew up a plan for guiding the installation, and picked a clear day to do it. Janquart said the installation took only a half-hour because crews were clear on their roles and executed them efficiently.

“The best part about it is, because we plan ahead, we are better at preventing those unforeseen things,” he said.

Riley also works to keep its employees safe in simpler ways. Safety managers began to notice several workers were seeing hand injuries on a job that required them to work with steel studs. So the company implemented a glove policy that required crews to wear gloves when handling the components. As a result, the hand injuries stopped.

Janquart said that policy wasn’t just effective because the company identified the problem. It worked, he said, because managers presented workers with a variety of different gloves to identify a model that workers would actually wear.

“What our experience shows is if the field guys are happy with the equipment, they’re more likely to use it,” Janquart said. “We try to involve them in these systems as well. The communication between all of us is key.”