October is National Safe Work Month, an important time to reflect and consider how we can all contribute to the delivery of a safe and healthy workplace.

Built strives to move our workplaces from less safe to more safe and our safety strategy is one key element supporting this move.  We focus on improving safety through controlling risks, ensuring safety leadership is always visible, and simplifying our safety systems to make applying our learnings easily accessible. By embedding our safety goals into all aspects of our business, we drive forward a culture of authentic care and concern in order to keep everyone safe.

Learning from high-potential events

Operating in high-risk construction environments means that we need to focus on improving our processes to reduce risk. One way that Built reduces risk is by reporting high-potential events. This provides critical data and insights into any gaps in our safety processes and helps us to analyse where we can make improvements. For example, an analysis of high-potential events in 2022 identified that an increased risk of the potential for people fall from height. Built assessed how this risk could be better managed on sites and presented the findings to all construction workers and subcontractor partners at a recent Safety Stand Down event.

Visible safety culture and leadership

To create a workplace environment where safety is always front of mind, it’s important that our commitment to safety is always visible and engaging. A key way that Built does this is through our Built Worthy Site Behaviours program, where everyone on site shares in the ownership of common goals.

It’s our unique way of ensuring everyone works together toward better safety and quality outcomes and is represented through four key behavioural themes:​​

• Tell it like it is
• See it. Call it. Fix it
• Plan before you act
• Work together, make it better

Thinking differently on site

By bringing together technology and culture, Built has achieved strong safety outcomes across our projects. At Built’s refurbishment of the State Library Victoria, several initiatives were implemented to maximise the safety of workers and mitigate risks posed by working on a historic building, including hazardous materials and unknown live electrical, water and gas services. Digital Engineering (DE) technologies were used to plan works accurately, reducing the amount of time subcontractors were required on site and therefore exposed to potential safety risks. A system was established to minimise the risk of exposure to unknown hazardous substances and live services, which included a robust training program for all site personnel and setting up an onsite lab to test potentially hazardous materials.

Creating a culture that celebrates safety successes also helps to promote workplace safety. At Built’s recladding project at 31 Market St in the Sydney CBD, the team recently shared a safety achievement for installing a mast climber with the wider business. The installation involved 5,040 bolts and 1,020 mast sections across 38 stories and four elevations. Robust planning and safety workshops were carried out to ensure there were no dropped items, no near misses, no lost time injuries and no first aid treatment. Sharing what worked well is critical to future success and helps to de-risk the project so that these learnings can be applied in the future.

Safely. Always.

Built has a clear safety vision: Make it safe, Make it personal and Make it simple, which underpins everything we do at Built. By continuously reviewing our processes, learning from our experiences and fostering a collaborative culture, we create an organisational culture for safety to thrive. It is this culture which underpins our approach to safety – aligning individual and collective efforts to ensure we have a consistent safety approach across our business.