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Safety in Numbers
A scarcity of qualified safety personnel is aggravating the industry's overall safety image
By Bruce Buckley
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| Construction firms are increasingly competing with other industries to recruit talented safety professionals. |
ncreased demand for safety personnel on jobsites, coupled with the overall growth in construction activity in recent years, has created a spike in demand to fill safety positions.
That means construction firms are employing a variety of strategies to staff their jobs, retain talent and keep clients happy. “Clients are more sophisticated and have an expectation that construction projects don’t have to cause injuries that harm workers or the community,” says Anthony O’Dea, director of corporate safety at Gilbane Building Co. in Providence, R.I. “The value of that additional staff member has become recognized of late and made him or her a critical part of the team.”
D.A. Collins Construction, Mechanicville, N.Y., has seen its safety department grow from one staffer to five in the past decade, which has proven a daunting task, says owner David Collins. The company recently underwent an extensive search for a safety director, spending months flying in candidates.
“The safety position is without a doubt the hardest position to fill because of all the demanding skill levels required,” Collins says. “We can develop superintendents by taking field people and making them foremen, then superintendents. But we’re not looking to create safety people from within. We want people with safety degrees who work well in the field and the office. It’s tough to hire that person off the bat.”
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| Most safety programs at colleges and universities prepare students to enter a wide range of industries when they graduate. Construction safety positions are among the hardest to fill. |
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| Gilbane Building Co., Providence, R.I., teaches company culture as part of its Gilbane University, where new hires are required. (Photo courtesy of Gilbane Building Co.) |
The demand is driving up salaries. Jeffrey M. Robinson, president of Saline, Mich.-based research firm Personnel Administration Services Inc., says that salaries were stagnant in 2003 and 2004 but have risen dramatically since then. Between 2004 and 2007, salaries for experienced safety personnel increased by 17%, with bonuses up by 42%, he says. By comparison, superintendents saw salaries rise 15% during the same period. The average base salary for a safety director in 2007 was $78,820, with bonuses at $10,375, according to PAS research.
“With increased activity in the construction market, companies need the safety personnel to support that growth,” Robinson says. “On top of that, no one wants to be any less safe.”
Intensive Search
As companies search for safety staff with more formal training and degrees, construction firms are increasingly competing with other industries such as manufacturing for talent. Most safety programs at colleges and universities prepare students to enter a wide range of industries when they graduate.
David Fender, associate professor in the occupational safety and health program at Murray State University, Murray, Ky., says that his college is “not having trouble placing students in jobs whatsoever.... This year, we could place a lot more safety people than we have,” he says. “Our output is not meeting demand.”
Fender notes that getting students to consider any career in construction is challenging, and most of the students who take an interest in the industry’s safety field have a personal or family background in construction. “By and large, the construction industry has the reputation of being tough,” he says. “Conditions on a construction site are constantly changing. There’s a lot of outside work and it often requires a lot of travel. Only certain students are looking for that.”
McCarthy Building Co., St. Louis, scrutinizes colleges for future safety staffers and has hired more than two dozen in the last decade, says Gary Amsinger, the firm’s corporate vice president of safety. “Our philosophy is to recruit safety professionals right out of school, train them in the business and grow our own people in lieu of always being in the mode of having to find people to fit jobs,” he adds. “We’re looking for individuals that have made a conscious decision to follow a career path in safety and health, not engineers who we ask to be safety guys.”
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| Building their communications skills so safety supervisors can earn the respect of workers in the field can be a long process. |
But finding young safety professionals and bringing them up to speed on the industry is only the first step. Building their communications skills so they can earn the respect of workers in the field can be a long and difficult process. Many construction companies, like McCarthy, put interns out in the field to identify their interpersonal strengths early on. “When they’re interns, we get a good look at their ability to communicate,” Amsinger says. “They could understand the regulations, but if you can’t communicate that to the workers, then it’s not a good fit for us.”
Getting Comfortable
Even after graduates are hired, it can take years of mentoring to get them comfortable in the field, says David Korman, environmental health and safety director at Skanska USA, New York City. “We can’t take a 22-year-old kid out of school and put him or her on a major project,” he says. “In places like New York City, it’s a jungle they’d get eaten alive. It’s tough enough for someone like myself to earn respect from the workers in that environment.” Instead, Skanska partners its new recruits with senior staff to help bridge the gap and build their confidence, Korman says.
Developing young staff also offers the opportunity to instill the company’s culture in them. In addition to following the necessary safety regulations, many companies have their own policies and procedures that go beyond U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. Gilbane teaches company culture as part of its Gilbane University program, where new hires are required to complete a rigorous corporate safety curriculum.
As with many positions, safety staffing demands can ebb and flow with workload. EC Co., Portland, Ore., has developed a strong reputation in the safety field. Last year, it earned the AGC/Willis Construction Safety Excellence Award in the category of specialty contractor with over 1 million work hours. But earning that honor has not come easy, says Mark Hopkins, EC's corporate safety manager.
The company currently has five safety staffers, but needs as many as 12 during busy periods. "Once we have the talent on board, the biggest challenge is keeping them," Hopkins says. "It's hard to justify keeping people when you're in-between projects. We spend all of this time bringing them up to speed on our safety culture and all of a sudden we have to let them go. When it comes time to hire again, we go back to our past talent pool, but more often than not, they are already working for someone else," he explains.
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