The Strategic Partnership Between Construction Safety and HR

A construction safety manager’s role is significant: It entails broad oversight over the construction workplace to prevent incidents that could cause worker injury or property damage. In addition to this primary responsibility, maintaining compliance, training workers and performing inspections are among the many other duties of a safety staff member.

Meanwhile, human resources professionals in construction have intersecting and parallel responsibilities — especially because their role is integral in maintaining employee well-being and productivity. Because of this, a strong partnership between these two departments will greatly enhance their effectiveness. 

This article explores potential areas where construction safety professionals and human resources staff can partner to create success.

Getting Started on Collaboration

It’s not uncommon for safety and human resources professionals to have responsibilities that correlate and even overlap with one another. 

For example, when new employees are hired, human resources professionals manage the overall onboarding process. Meanwhile, safety professionals carry out an important part of that process by making sure new workers have the necessary training and gear for the tasks they are expected to perform on the jobsite. 

Collaboration between these two departments is also essential in an environment like construction, where there is a tendency to prioritize keeping pace with a schedule. Safety and HR can work together to champion a culture where safety is an ally of — and resource for — quality and productivity.

Scenarios like these demonstrate that effective collaboration between both parties will help them become more productive and successful.

To begin, professionals should work to break down silos between their departments by establishing regular rhythms of communication. That way, HR and safety staff can routinely check-in to identify common duties that would be good opportunities for collaboration. During this process, they can also identify any redundancy and eliminate wasted time spent on duplicative tasks.

Going further, both parties can take a look at establishing collaboration throughout the employee lifecycle, as well as in administrative and compliance processes.

The Employee Lifecycle: A Joint Responsibility

When safety and human resources professionals work together at each stage of the employee lifecycle, the result is a well-supported workforce that understands how their work fits in and contributes to the company’s operations and mission. 

Here are a few ways safety and HR can collaborate at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

1. Recruitment

A high-quality safety program tightly aligned with HR practices can enhance a company’s reputation as a desirable workplace. When a company is known for prioritizing employee well-being and safety, potential candidates will be more likely to consider working there. As a result, construction firms put themselves in a favorable position for hiring top talent, which creates a more successful team.

2. Onboarding

A well-executed onboarding program sets the right expectations for safety and operational procedures. Safety staff can play a significant role in the process by creating and/or reviewing the onboarding curriculum with HR to incorporate important safety subjects. 

Safety professionals can also assist in the delivery of onboarding curriculum in the field, because workers often enter the jobsite directly, bypassing the office where the HR department is commonly located. 

Finally, safety can assist HR in making sure field workers are provided with benefits enrollment information. While safety professionals might consider employee benefits as an area that is solely owned by HR, they should also consider the fact that these benefits, including health insurance and access to an employee assistance program (EAP), will significantly impact an employee’s ability to maintain their wellbeing on and off the jobsite. Therefore, it would be beneficial for safety pros to lend a hand, if needed, in making sure new employees are informed about benefits and how to enroll.

3. Employee Training and Ongoing Development

Developing safety training that empowers employees to do their jobs safely and effectively is one of the primary responsibilities for safety managers. Meanwhile, human resources managers are responsible for understanding labor laws and delivering workplace compliance training to staff. 

While the two departments own separate topics of training curriculum, their topics often reinforce and complement one another.

For example, code of conduct training teaches the importance of ethical and safe behavior. Safety training on proper use of heavy machinery sets an expectation of prioritizing the wellbeing of workers and the surrounding environment. All of this creates a platform for teamwork, accountability and trust — important aspects of workplace culture.

Because of this, safety and HR should tightly coordinate on developing ongoing training curriculum and championing the training program across the company. 

4. Creating a Positive Employee Experience

Creating a harmonious and positive experience in the workplace is integral in retaining employees. While it might seem like a nebulous endeavor, construction leaders can set a successful stage by breaking down silos to tackle this area together.

One area of opportunity where collaboration would make a positive impact is the development and ongoing management of employee recognition and rewards programs. 

Safety professionals can use these programs as an opportunity to highlight exceptional safety performance. By recognizing safety within the organization's overall reward and recognition framework, managers can elevate the importance of safety beyond the jobsite level. HR professionals can extend this recognition by coordinating with other departments, like marketing, to amplify employee recognition and payroll if salary increases or bonuses are a part of recognition.

5. Offboarding

The end of an employee’s tenure also offers a unique lens into how to positively influence the tenure of others. Whether a staff member is leaving for another opportunity, switching careers or even retiring, a meeting to explore his or her experience will help leaders discover potential improvements they can make to benefit the rest of the staff.

Safety professionals should partner with HR to include safety-specific questions during exit interviews. This way, improvement areas can be identified and properly managed, resulting in a safer work place.

Working Together on Administration and Compliance

Outside of the employee lifecycle, there are also potential collaborative opportunities within the administrative and compliance duties of safety and HR professionals. Collaboration in these areas will create efficiency and reduce redundancy.

Bridging the Gap Between Office and Field

A construction firm’s workers are often distributed across jobsites without physical connectivity to the office, which means leaders must work diligently to prevent communication gaps or errors. Since safety professionals spend a majority of the time in the field while HR professionals spend time in the office, they can work together to extend communication on each others’ behalf. 

Navigating Legal and Regulatory Landscapes

Both safety and HR have responsibilities that make sure workplace best practices and laws are followed. While safety has a specific role to play in establishing compliance with safety regulations, HR has specific but intersecting duties in understanding and following labor laws. So, the two departments can create efficiency by being each other’s counterparts in compliance.

For example, human resources professionals are well-versed in whistleblower policies, and safety managers can utilize HR as a safe avenue for staff to report workplace safety concerns. If someone's not having success elevating safety concerns at the jobsite level, human resources can be a point of communication to receive that type of information from employees anonymously, and to handle things discreetly and through the right pathway.

Another area of potential collaboration is in the coordination of establishing rigorous policies and communication to help maintain compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. While this responsibility is typically owned by human resources, safety managers can be an ally in the process by answering questions that might come up in the field about specific accommodations that are being made for employees.

Record-Keeping and Corrective Action

Typically, human resources professionals own each employee’s “file,” which means gathering and keeping a record of all documents related to a worker’s employment, including signed employment contracts, payroll data, performance reviews and more. 

Meanwhile, safety managers also own part of that responsibility when it comes to making sure to collect licenses and certifications that are necessary for the employee’s job function. For this reason, maintaining accurate and thorough employee records is an area where HR and safety should collaborate. 

Because a safety manager has the significant responsibility of ensuring safety, maintaining accountability will be an ongoing part of that duty. This is where human resources can lend support to safety professionals. 

Collaboration between the two will be especially important in the area of keeping track of employee safety performance, recording any observations of non-compliance with safety procedures, documenting recurrent concerns of employee behavior and making corrective action plans. 

Safety accountability is where safety and HR can work together. If there's a safety issue that leads to a change in employment status, HR and safety must be united.

Caring for Employees: Handling Incidents and Claims

In a situation where an incident occurs on the job, safety and human resources must establish tight coordination to manage the response and path forward to achieve desired outcomes. First, professionals from both departments should work together on investigating the incident to understand the circumstances, create proper documentation, create corrective action plans and, if necessary, manage workers’ compensation claims.

If an employee is injured as a result of an accident, return-to-work programs are much more effective when safety and HR collaborate on employee recovery, making sure proper care is provided and communication between the employee, supervisor and team is effective.

Safety managers should also be mindful of taking care of employees after they return to work. In some cases, an employee might come back to work but has been instructed by their healthcare providers to modify their activity.

The simple presence of a worker might create an assumption among other staff that the worker is “back to normal,” and safety managers should make sure supervisors and coworkers are aware of modifications that need to be made for the employee.

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Cross-Function Collaboration: Not Just a Jargon Term

Because of the dispersed and transient nature of construction work, creating a harmonious and highly effective workforce can often be challenging. When leadership teams prioritize cross-functional collaboration, there are outcomes that can positively affect workforce operations and culture. 

This is especially true for safety and human resources. A strong partnership between the two departments will create administrative efficiency and a positive employee experience across the full lifecycle. 

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