Incident reporting has proven to reduce incident rates, but what if you report those incidents on a comprehensive, connected safety technology platform? Andrew Barron, the chief product officer at HammerTech, sat down with Construction Executive to review findings from their Safety at Scale 2025 report, and explain how those findings might relate to the construction industry at large.
9:00 AM is the most injury-prone moment of the day. How can site managers or team leaders prepare their teams properly to avoid injuries around this time?
That 9 a.m. spike is interesting. By now most crews have been working for a couple of hours and are approaching their first break. Focus can start to waver as people mentally shift from task mode to rest mode, which can make that pre-break window particularly high risk.
Several contributors in the Safety at Scale 2025 report noted this transition: From talking about work to actually doing it is when attention can dip or coordination gaps appear.
One of the best ways to manage this period is to treat the hand-off as part of the safety routine, not after it. Clear sequencing, supervisors staying active through that early work cycle, and holding off on high-risk activities until crews are fully settled all help. It’s less about adding another process and more about maintaining focus as the day picks up.
Any use cases of how to safely shift from prep to work?
As touched on in Safety at Scale 2025, one HammerTech user runs short “Club 1:30” briefings every afternoon, talking through tomorrow’s plan so mornings aren’t the first time anyone hears it. Another re-checks pre-task plans after each break, especially in the morning. These simple, to-the-point additions can improve risk predictability and reduce potential early-hour slips.
Even with well-structured work plans too, execution can sometimes lag. Implementing a periodic audit program to review tasks against the plan and close identified gaps can help strengthen follow-through.
Does staggering start work better or worse in terms of incident rate?
Every project has its unique rhythms and complexities. Staggering can help ease congestion and let supervisors be more hands-on as crews start, but only if supervision and communication scale with it. Let’s say one safety lead covers three staggered starts. You may have stretched that risk window, not reduced it.
Do you have data on how workers are spending their time away from work (night and morning routines) in order to prepare for the morning at work?
We don’t track routines off site. And what happens outside the gates is largely beyond the contractor’s control. But there are still opportunities to design site routines that don’t punish normal human behavior—to accept that focus, rhythm and readiness, build during those first couple of hours and to plan supervision and task sequencing accordingly.
On the top three injury mechanisms (same-level falls, struck-bys, contact with objects): The industry already knows these causes. How can companies better prepare their workers to be more area-aware/self-aware when on a jobsite?
Awareness is a skill, not a slogan. Toolbox talks alone won’t build it. You must make situational awareness part of the workflow, from crews discussing their environment during pre-task plans to supervisors reinforcing what “good” looks like in context. These mechanisms persist because habits are hard to change. They shift when they’re no longer reactive but become baked into site routines.
Companies can help reinforce that awareness by making safety information visible and actionable in real-time. Crews engage with task-specific risks each day, supervisors can see where attention might be slipping, and automated follow-ups keep issues from fading into the background. It’s about keeping situational awareness part of how work gets done, never an afterthought.
Humans are prone to error. Is there any technology/robotics that are helping mitigate these incidents/taking humans’ place in certain roles that involve these types of equipment?
As seen in mining, robotics can reduce risk exposure—provided the machines are specified, deployed and maintained safely. But we believe most gains on live jobs still come from error proofing with connected workflows.
For example:
- Permit zones and conflict checks keep people-plant interfaces and hot work overlaps visible before work starts.
- Inspection answers that fail auto-create observations with an owner and proof required to close, so controls don’t quietly drift.
- HammerTech Intelligence speeds capture at the point of work—a photo or short recording can prefill an observation or a PTP, so detail is logged while it’s fresh.
The broader pattern in the report, more reporting and proportionally fewer injuries among HT users since 2018, lines up with earlier intervention and visibility rather than robotics taking over tasks.
Has this percentage remained relatively consistent over the years/decades?
Those injury mechanisms—same-level falls, struck-bys and contact with objects—appear repeatedly, not just in our data but across decades of OSHA, Safe Work Australia and BLS reports. While these patterns haven’t changed much, what’s improving is our ability to pinpoint where and when they happen with structured, connected site data.
Technology doesn’t fix the issue. But it gives contractors a clearer picture of the environments and activities where risk tends to concentrate to enable smarter, more targeted interventions.
On the 23% drop in the injury-to-incident ratio: Why is having data in one source of truth so beneficial for mitigating and/or reducing safety incidents?
Because nothing gets buried, everything safety-related is connected and the right people see it fast. Teams describe moving from inbox threads to shared, live records with automatic notifications, which changes how reviews and responses happen in real time.
Inside the end-to-end system, dashboards and insights make process load, gaps and trends visible—enabling teams to cut duplicate forms, streamline sign-ons and focus follow-up where it matters most. Take a pre-task plan, you can see all the relevant data associated with that decision. That’s a key benefit of using a singular platform.
This visibility also allows users to directly correlate leading and lagging indicators, helping teams target their efforts where they have the greatest impact on incident reduction. Across six years of data, that shift in visibility aligns with a 23% decrease in the injury-to-incident ratio.
How prevalent is this type of platform becoming across the construction industry?
They’re becoming standard for contractors serious about safety, especially those working across multiple sites or high-risk sectors. It’s that connected ecosystem that makes safety data usable at scale and safety treated as a core delivery pillar, not a compliance layer.
The stats speak for themselves. For over a decade, HammerTech has been used by over 600 main contractors on 70,000-plus projects worldwide, with participation from more than 400,000 subcontractors, largely in commercial, industrial and civil work. That gives a decent read on how common connected safety platforms have become in those sectors.
On scale, culture, and proactive safety: Contractors are logging huge volumes of safety activity. How can contractors get a better hold of this data?
The data tell us what we already know: The scale of safety processes site teams are running day in, day out, is staggering.
Let’s assume that, “Log tens of thousands of safety activities annually,” means logging them into a safety management platform. Then:
- Use the built-In Insights module to build and share dashboards, schedule emails and set KPI alerts for things like unsigned JHAs/SWMS or overdue observations.
- Pull raw data into BI tools through the OData Reporting API. Most teams wire it to Power BI for companywide trend reviews.
- Export operational reports straight from the app when you just need a cut of injuries, incidents, hours or permits for a time window.
This is how some report contributors said they identified duplicate processes to retire, checklists to combine and weak spots to prioritize. It really reflects the power of connected data and how it can turn noise into signal, transforming what was once clutter into data that actually improves safety.
How can companies help workers feel more confident speaking up on what is and isn’t working for their safety?
When reporting is easy, participation grows. That’s something our customers tell us time and time again. If logging an observation or incident takes 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes, and if everyone—from tradespeople to supervisors—can do it from their phone without worrying about access limits, reporting culture changes.
That’s part of why an unlimited-access model matters. Safety is a team sport; it should never be gated. When everyone can participate and see their input leading to action, you’re building a more transparent and resilient safety culture.
How is stigma around reporting changing?
It’s improving but remains uneven. For a long time, silence was misread as success. Now, more reporting is increasingly seen as a positive indicator: a sign that people feel safe to speak up. As one Safety at Scale 2025 contributor put it: “No news isn’t always good news. It could mean that nothing’s being done. Reporting shows you’re on top of safety.”
This reporting shift is primarily a culture shift. It doesn’t hinge on process changes or technology alone. But integrated and field-first technologies are critical to moving the needle here.
Real-time visibility and reporting capability removes the bottleneck of paperwork. They make it clear that every report, big or small—like the 75,000-plus incidents recorded in HammerTech between 2018 and 2024 and analysed in Safety at Scale 2025—adds value.
As data becomes more connected and shared across regions and roles, conversations can then move from blame to learning, prevention and visibility. That’s real progress.
Broader Reflections: What does proactive safety look like in practice?
Proactive safety is usually quite practical: using the data you already haveinspections, observations, near-misses, etc.—to identify where risks may be increasing and make adjustments before an incident or injury occurs.
Again, the assumption is that there is a safety management platform in play. Then it looks like running the work and the safety controls in the same flow, with small gates where risk becomes predictable. Crews don’t go from talking to tools without a quick Start Work check in the permit.
People sign onto the exact PTP/JHA or SWMS at the workface so the plan and the roster match. Supervisors time a short walk around the mid-morning window the data highlights, not after it. If an inspection answer fails, the system raises an action with an owner and asks for evidence to close. Dashboards and alerts keep unsigned documents, overdue observations and live permits in view, so interventions happen while work is live.
Which processes consistently move the needle and which just check a box?
The ones that change behavior at the point of work actually help.
For example:
- Permit start-to-finish checks create a deliberate pause before high-risk tasks begin and again when they end.
- Sign-ins that block expired licences or missing inductions stop problems at the gate.
- PTP/JHA sign-ons tied to the real crew and location keep controls specific. Inspections that auto-create observations and require a fix photo close the loop.
- Focus on high-risk activities to help teams target those areas with the greatest impact on preventing the most serious injuries.
What tends to be box-ticking is static PDFs parked in a folder, categories so broad they hide repeat issues, and obscure permit types used a handful of times a year that add noise without improving control.
How should leaders think about safety data as operational intelligence, not just compliance?
Standardize how it is captured, make it visible to the people who can act and put it on a cadence. Publish shared dashboards and set alerts so things like unsigned JHAs or overdue actions don’t rely on someone chasing email.
Push the dataset into BI when you need comparisons by site, contractor or build type, and reconcile basics like hours from the sign-in book against the site diary to find gaps. Then review the same cuts every month, including high-potential incidents, and let those patterns move supervision, scheduling and focus.
The long-run trend we’ve seen—more reporting paired with a smaller share of incidents resulting in injury—is what you get when data is used to steer operations, not just file paperwork.
SEE ALSO: SO YOU WANT TO BUILD A SAFETY PLAN
