Integrated Safety, Quality, and Production

When a contractor is in the early stages of growth, safety, quality, and production are often naturally integrated due to the company’s small size. How well they stay integrated depends on the company’s leader — their approach sets the cultural foundation.

That foundation is shaped by the leader’s personal experiences. And since we all have different experiences, great decisions require both an awareness of those experiences and an understanding of the biases they create. For example:

• Seeing safety only as a checklist or compliance system. 
• Working with a small, experienced crew where injuries were low, even when using riskier installation methods.
• Early projects with large owners like the Army Corps of Engineers, whose structured QA (right process) and QC (right outcomes) programs can feel like stifling levels of bureaucracy. 

Unfortunately, many construction leaders have spent their careers in siloed environments like these — where each function must fight for resources and control, battling over a perceived “fixed pie” and forced trade-offs. 

Another common belief is that "Individual Accountability" solves everything. Every craftsperson — and especially every Foreman and Superintendent — is expected to have both the capabilities and capacity to consistently integrate all three areas, every time. But this belief often leads to overload, which worsens outcomes across safety, quality, and production. It also lowers morale and increases turnover. Accountability must rest on a foundation of clarity, capabilities, and capacity. 

These challenges are often compounded by delays in adding the first support roles for safety and quality. Like all "First-of-a-Kind" efforts, these initial people, processes, and functions will come with problems.  

As the company grows — beyond 50 people, 150 people, and beyond — it becomes critical to build structure, systems, and individuals with deeper expertise in areas like safety and quality. This is also when production begins to break into more specialized functions, such as planning, purchasing, fabrication, equipment, logistics, and scheduling. Everything discussed below about integrating safety, quality, and production applies equally to integrating the growing elements of production as the company scales 

Integration is an ongoing process, not a destination. There are five basic stages that build on each other. Each stage of growth may require going back to what was a prior foundation and strengthening it — just like you would for progressively larger structures. Below are some additional details with some self-evaluation questions. Please contact us to discuss any of these. We will share anything we've learned that will help the industry. 

1. Values and vision for the company and how it ties to safety, quality, and productivity.
2. Collaboration capabilities across the whole team.
3. Standards at the right level for your stage of growth and integrating safety, quality, and productivity.
4. Feedback loops for continuous improvement.
5. Innovation.

Integration begins with a shared set of values and vision. You might call these behaviors, beliefs, purpose — the words may vary, but the intent is all the same. 

1. Do you have individual clarity around these, even if it is not perfectly articulated? 
2. If we were to ask one of your team members about them, how closely would they align? Remember the diffusion effect of leadership communications.
3. How do you connect safety, quality, and productivity to these in a way that everyone can understand and use to make decisions when there are gray areas, or doing what's right is hard? All decisions are easy when it is a simple right or wrong decision choice. 

Next comes this question: Does your team — from leadership to the front line — truly work together collaboratively? Not just on paper. Not just in meetings. But day to day, under pressure, and especially when things go wrong. This includes having enough trust (all three components) in each other to engage in constructive conflict. If this isn't in place, you can't really move too much further — it is like building a skyscraper on a bad foundation. 

1. What were the last three meetings you had with a team where decisions were required? Not simple decisions. Not small decisions. Decisions that had multiple perspectives, competing priorities, and uncertain outcomes yet required everyone to work together to execute.  
2. How would you evaluate each of those meetings and the subsequent outcomes based on the 5D Model? This is a demonstration that you have built a strong foundation for integration. On a scale of 0-10, did everyone participating in the meeting....
   • Deeply learn all aspects, including those they didn't agree with, so they showed up prepared?
   • Discuss everyone's perspectives and experiences until there was common understanding? Without dismissing or debating, just working to understand each other's positions. Steel Manning vs. Straw Manning.
   • Debate the items where there was still differing perspectives after discussion? Effective debate IS NOT an argument. Effective debate means everyone is equal in position during the debate. 
   • Decide on a course of action before the "Last Responsible Moment" and by the person (job role) that is directly responsible for this decision? The Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) is not always the highest ranking person in the room — they may be accountable, but decisions must be made at the right levels for scalability. 
   • Deliver on the action plan decided on — regardless of the decision made? This gets to the commitment, accountability, and results levels of the teamwork pyramid. 

Note that all five stages of this process may occur in minutes during a morning huddle on a jobsite laying out the daily plan, over a structured weekly meeting when reviewing the short-interval look ahead plan, or over multiple meetings and months while evaluating strategic market choices. Watch of the 5Ds. Watch for things unsaid. Evaluate actions — those are louder than any words or body language. 

With that foundation in place, the next layer comes down to standards. How clearly do you define standards for safety, quality, and productivity? All standards start with individual judgment — thumbs up or down. Standards must evolve with headcount, progressing from individual judgement to clear outcomes, variability tolerances, how-to procedures, and management systems.

Remember that standards progress over time. A 50-person contractor requires a far different level of standards than a 500-person contractor.

Also remember that if standards are designed and managed correctly, they enable everyone to improve. If they are negatively impacting collective outcomes, something must change. 

1. Of your total job costs during the last year, what are your five most frequent installation tasks and what percentage of your total job costs do they make up?
2. Do you have measurement systems in place for installation tasks? What do they show in terms of outcomes versus estimates — including variability? 
3. What level of standards do you have in place for your top five most frequent installation tasks? 
4. On a scale of 0-10, how effectively do each of those standards define safety, quality, and productivity? 
5. How consistently are those tasks being completed to the standards defined?

The next element to integration is a feedback loop. This builds on the foundation of collaboration and the standards. Compared to standards, there will be unexpected outcomes — both great and not so great. Both require investigation so the team can learn. 

1. How effectively does your team work through the questions for continuous improvement? 

Standards and continuous improvement are foundational. Without them, there can be no progress. However, innovation must always be on the table. These can be innovations in design, materials, equipment, tools, or installation methods. This is where large, non-incremental improvements occur. The nature of innovation is that many experiments will fail. Many others will take many iterations to be viable. Only a few will pay off immediately. This is where you have to balance exploration (innovation) with exploitation (focusing on what you know works).

Remember that the safest, highest quality, and most productive installation is the one that is either eliminated 100% due to design or can be 100% automated. Most things will fall somewhere in between.

Designing and building a specialized attachment that eliminates the need for jackhammers. Fabricating and installing a duct bank without requiring anyone to enter the trench. Manufacturing entire building modules off-site, shifting thousands of labor hours from working at heights to working in a controlled factory environment.

1. Who on your team — including you — would you consider “crazy creative” when it comes to finding new ways of doing things? They won’t always be right, but progress starts with the ideas no one else sees.

2. What do you do to stretch the thinking of yourself and your team? What do you read? What industry events do you go to? Who do you talk to outside your company (or industry) on a regular basis? 

Remember that integration is more than a checklist of the items above. Integration is also part of job roles and levels of the organization. If you are struggling with integration including consistent outcomes, your structure may be another place to look.