As Construction Safety Week 2025 approaches, companies are taking a harder look at one of the predominant factors pertaining to jobsite safety—or lack thereof—and how they can mitigate its inherent risk: the human factor. Under the theme “All in Together,” the week of May 5-9 will focus on how teams can plan, own and commit together, and that comes with planning for and owning up to mistakes. From individual behaviors to group interactions, from physical wellbeing to mental health, humans aren’t perfect and even the best of them introduce variables from day to day that leave room for error.
Jerry Shupe, chief health and safety officer at Hensel Phelps, sat down with Construction Executive to help elucidate how the human factor in construction should be considered to actually improve projects.
WHAT IS THE HUMAN FACTOR?
One thing that makes humans unique pertaining to navigating the complexities of the construction industry is their emotion. Emotion leads to creativity in design, compassion for a site’s rich history and passion for bringing a vision to life. However, emotion also leads to occasionally glossing over details and inciting disagreements.
“When we’re looking at an incident on a project,” Shupe says, “and as we start trying to figure out where the failures occurred, I think oftentimes there’s a tendency for people to blame people. But what we often forget is that no one goes to work and wants to get hurt. And oftentimes there are so many different contributing factors to why an incident occurred.” Human emotion can blind people in the moment to the true contributors to injury or accident. That doesn’t mean the human factor should be eliminated—as many are worried AI or robotics will replace them—but rather supported to properly serve the project.
Shupe says, “No matter how much we preach safety and doing things the right way, I think a lot of times what people hear is we have to get the job done. How this really ties to human performance is making sure that we’re giving people the right tools, we’re creating the right working environment and we’re really setting people up to work safely and successfully.”
FIRST AND FOREMOST
Training in construction is paramount, and the industry is typically spot-on at providing proper jobsite training. But to ensure that training is effective, it must be pertinent to person and project.
“If someone’s going to be working in a trench,” says Shupe, “we’re giving them the right training for that. If they’re going to be working at height, we’re giving them the right training for that. But sometimes where the industry can fail is by not looking at the broader training that we might give to a salaried professional in the office. Are we giving our foremen leadership development training on how to have difficult conversations? Are we giving our craft professionals actual skills to use the tools we expect them to use every single day and to use them while working amongst each other? It really comes down to understanding what training is available and providing a greater catalog of training.”
But how does a company decide what to put in this catalog? Determining a project’s risk profile is a concrete place to start—and this is done by measuring the human factor. All contractors know that culture on a jobsite is palpable thanks to that human factor of emotion. At Hensel Phelps, Shupe and team have found a way to measure 20 separate indicators that affect the risk profile of projects. “We found that we were able to accurately predict an incident within 30 days with 78% accuracy,” says Shupe—a remarkable and optimistic statistic. Some of what Hensel Phelps measured and learned include:
- PTO—People are more likely to have an incident within the first 24 to 48 hours of returning from PTO.
- Safety Observations—If project teams are not consistently making safety observations or only focusing on unsafe behaviors (versus recognizing what people are doing well), there is increased risk.
- Weather—Weather such as rain, temperature, snow, wind, fog, etc. increases risk.
- Turnover—As you hire people, transfer people to a new project, bring on trade partners, etc., risk increases.
- Project Start/Finish—The first 6 months and last 6 months of a project have increased risk.
In recognizing the human factor, construction companies are also recognizing that risk is inherent and accidents will happen. While all companies strive for optimal safety, the best companies also prepare for recovery after a variety of accidents. When people hear ‘accident’ in relation to ‘human error,’ their instinct is to picture someone operating a piece of heavy machinery, not someone in a C-suite office. What they also don’t picture is how those two images correlate. When considering the human factor, it makes sense that all accidents—and individuals—are related, and so must be all responses to those accidents.
“How we respond as an organization,” says Shupe, and not just as individuals, is ultimately what determines what can be learned from an accident and how trust can be restored.
IMPERFECTION MAKES PERFECT
An appropriate response to an accident stems from proper preparation. As mentioned earlier, people tend to blame each other when an accident occurs, but it’s also imperative to acknowledge that accidents will happen, and to have a recovery plan in place for when they do.
“One of the core things that any organization really needs to do is build trust from the moment someone walks onto their project,” says Shupe. “Finding common ground is really important. Like I mentioned earlier, nobody wants to go to work and get hurt. We as an employer, we don’t want people to get hurt on our project. So if we can really try to find that common ground and get to know the people that we’re working with every single day, so they know we have their best interest in mind and they know we’re trying to do what’s best for them and best for the organization, I think that’s really what’s paramount in building trust and gaining respect.”
THE INHUMAN FACTOR
Acknowledging the human factor is imperative in establishing construction safety culture, but there are inhuman factors that can facilitate this establishment. As construction technology has evolved, so has the human factor. This is not to say that contech is replacing people on the jobsite or that it is eliminating risks altogether, but it is empowering people to be more aware of their own risks—the ones they pose and the ones they assume.
“We are seeing safety technology become widely adopted over the past few years,” says Shupe. “One thing we’ve been working on is a safety application that uses artificial intelligence to predict risk on the project because we know that certain things on projects do drive risk. For example, we seem to have more incidents around the holidays—Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s—and we’ve felt that for a very long time. But when we started working with this company, we wanted to figure out if that is really true. What we learned is that when people come back from PTO, we are more likely to have an incident within the first 24 to 48 hours.”
This was one of the twenty indicators Shupe mentioned above that Hensel Phelps is using to provide a risk score to each of its projects and project leaders. “That score is constantly being reevaluated and will hopefully provide actionable insight that leadership can act on,” says Shupe. Perhaps people will be more vigilant as the holidays approach and pass by, “when we know a lot of people are taking PTO,” he says. “Let’s make sure we’re doing additional safety stand downs and pre-test planning, and that everyone is bringing their best self to the job.”
The human factor has always and will always pose risk to construction projects, but there are ways to empower humans to identify, plan around and recover from those risks. This Construction Safety Week—and every week—companies have the opportunity to create a really positive safety culture, where people feel really good about going to work every day. “I tend to think you’re going to see a lot fewer incidents on those projects,” says Shupe.
Make sure your company is prepared to be All in Together during Safety Week 2025. With events happening every day from May 5-9—and the industrywide safety stand-down on Wednesday, May 7—start planning today to ensure your company doesn’t miss out. Find more information at constructionsafetyweek.com.
SEE ALSO: ABC PROUDLY ANNOUNCES SPONSORSHIP OF CONSTRUCTION SAFETY WEEK
