GREG HOGG: I'm Greg Hogg. I'm the safety team lead from BOND Building.
STEPHEN MASSEY: Stephen Massey, corporate safety director for all the BOND companies.
TONY BOND: And Tony Bond, CEO and President of BOND.
TONY MILITELLO: So, Tony, tell me in the broadest terms how important is safety to your organization?
TONY BOND: Safety is critical to our organization. We're 117-year-old firm. And it's been just something that's been paramount to us. Because when we started the business, everybody knew everybody that worked in the organization. So it was ensuring that your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues all went home every day. And of course, the business has grown in scale since we started. But that's been something that's been a common thread that has grown with us over those 117 years.
So to us, it's not something that needs to be forced or I would say pushed down the organization. It is something that is preached by the ownership, by the executive team, by our leadership team here, as well as adopted by the folks delivering the projects and the work in the organization. They know it's just part of the Bond family. If you're part of the bond organization, it's something to be expected.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. Steve, can you tell us about some of the programs that you have in place to reduce operational risk?
STEPHEN MASSEY: Sure. Yeah, we're most proud of our safety excellence initiative, which is really a program we started about five years ago where trying to make safety part of the everyday conversation. In the past, we felt like safety has been put in a silo where we've talked operationally, talked about scheduling, and then you bring in safety to talk about their little piece and having to intertwined everything the way that we need to.
So one of the things that we're working on within the initiative is getting our operations and our safety teams to be better aligned and make sure that they're delivering a clear and concise message. And we've seen a lot of great results. We look for feedback from our employees through a variety of surveys over the years and making sure that message is clear from all levels of the organization is been really critical in our success.
TONY MILITELLO: What are some other areas of construction risk that you focus on?
STEPHEN MASSEY: We look at the pre-qualification of our subcontractors. Obviously, as a construction manager, subcontractors perform a large portion of our work making sure that our subcontractors have the safety infrastructure that we expect and that is needed to be successful. So not only are we pre-qualifying our subcontractors based on past performance, we're actually judging them in real time and looking at how they're performing on BOND projects.
So we're integrating all of this stuff through our pre-qualification program through Highwire. We look at our safety inspections within Highwire. Our projects upon completion, they're required to do subcontractor reviews so we can look at all of this information together and make really educated decisions.
When it comes to hiring a specific subcontractor, if there's any flags that we've noted in the system, whether previous incidents or whether it was a scheduling issue, whatever it happens to be, we put that subcontractor on a mitigation plan. So making sure that we're setting our teams up to be successful by providing them with qualified, vetted subcontractors.
TONY MILITELLO: Greg, I'm going to ask you, how important is leadership support to safety programs and the safety mindset of your organization?
GREG HOGG: It's so critical. It is mission critical for everything we do. The support that I have from both top down and bottom up, from foremen, superintendents, president, directors, the vice presidents, everybody gives us support. And that support, it really helps us walk the walk and talk the talk.
We have to make sure that we're doing the things that we say we're going to do. The authenticity, it has to be real. They have to feel it. And when they do, it clicks.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, that's great. Steve, in terms of safety, where do you think your organization stands out?
STEPHEN MASSEY: There's a lot of uniqueness about Bond brothers. Within the BOND Building company and with some of the other companies, we've always been kind of an eclectic group. We've done a variety of different things. We haven't really fallen into one bucket. So understanding how all aspects of the business work has kind of made us a little bit more well-rounded.
So I don't necessarily know if it's unique from a safety and health standpoint. But the fact that we care, the fact that we get out and visit the jobs. We provided our employees with a voice where they can speak up in a very comfortable atmosphere. The way we respond and intake some of those concerns is really paramount.
We've created a dialogue back and forth in the last few years and how we've integrated safety just to be part of the conversation. When we rolled out the safety excellence initiative and we created a logo about safety excellence, we made sure that safety excellence included quality and efficiency within the logo because it's all those three things working in harmony.
Safety, obviously, is paramount. We don't want to see anybody get hurt. But safety in a standalone silo doesn't mean that much if you're not integrating it into those other aspects of business.
TONY BOND: If I can just echo that, the feedback loop, the feedback system in our organization has been extremely powerful. And I think certainly something we've been able to leverage extensively over the past five, six, seven years to really enhance our program because it just creates a world of understanding. And I think our teams know from--
You're new to the job the first day or you've been here 30, 40 years, ask the question. Let's have a conversation about it. Because more important, you understand what we're trying to accomplish versus the policy or the procedure to the tee and just follow that without using some critical thinking skills to say, how do I adapt that to what I'm doing today?
STEPHEN MASSEY: Yeah, exactly. One of those themes that we've thrown at our employees is really just to get them to be open to new and innovative ways of doing things, not just within safety, but all aspects of our business. And we try to remind people that we don't do things how we used to do it 20 years ago, 30 years ago. There's been evolution in PPE in platforms of how to make our business more efficient.
So we just want people to be open to those new ideas. But also to Tony's point, we just completed another round of surveys with our field employees. And the reason we've been successful and the reason we do it every couple of years is because it's provided us with a good path moving forward on some of the areas that we need to focus on.
TONY MILITELLO: That's great. And kind of keeping along that same thread, what lies ahead for your organization in terms of overall risk reduction?
GREG HOGG: Well, I think a lot of our focus right now is on total well-being. So the mental health aspect of our business is really taking focus as of late. So much like our safety excellence initiative, we're trying to get that total well-being portion of the conversation embedded into everything that we do. So there's only so much we can do at the job site.
And all of us have a lot of things that are going on outside in our lives and those outside influences that we don't necessarily have any control over. But we can provide tools necessary for people to deal with them. And as long as we're creating good, open communication, we want our employees to feel comfortable to reach out if they're struggling or they need help in some way. And if we can get that total well-being piece integrated into our safety plan, I think that we're going to be really successful moving forward.
TONY MILITELLO: Tony, in addition to employee safety and worker safety, as a leader of the organization, what other risks do you see or what other risks are there that you are concerned about and maybe impediments to success?
TONY BOND: So I would certainly say just-- I think it's a big trending topic, of course, in the industry right now. But the workforce coming in is newer. There's bigger work going on. There's more complex work going on out there. And even in our own organization, we've seen our average project size increase dramatically just over the past five years alone.
So it's making sure that how do we make sure the processes, the team, everybody, every system that we have in place can scale to the size and meet the challenges that those clients are putting in front of us. Because that's safety and operational risk. That's people risk. That's client risk. That's a whole host of risk that we've got to bring into this whole calculation. And make sure that the organization is set up for success not only in 2024, but in 2027, in 2030, in 2035.
TONY MILITELLO: Greg, turning back to you, if you could name the single most important element of a successful safety program, what would that be?
GREG HOGG: Communication, making sure that everybody, whether it's Tony, Steve, one of my foremen, brand new co-op, whoever it is, has the ability to communicate their needs and to be able to understand what I need them to do. And that communication back and forth is probably the most important part of the process for me.
TONY MILITELLO: To all three of you, what would you recommend to anyone concerned with risk and safety in the construction industry?
GREG HOGG: I would recommend them to speak up. All too often, people just kind go with the flow, and they don't voice their concerns. And if you have a concern, I guarantee you someone else has a concern. And we exercise and we support the stop work authority initiative that we've rolled out.
And we tell our employees that if something doesn't feel right or look right, we want you to call a timeout. And I think that the misconception there, you're not stopping operation for the entire day. A timeout may be 20 seconds just to get us all on the same page, just about to reiterate what the roles and responsibilities are.
When we rolled out our 12 cardinal rules, which are just 12 simple safety rules that are the underlying foundation of our safety program, if you follow those 12 cardinal rules, nothing bad will happen. Now, one of those rules is if you're unsure, you stop. So you may not get the work done, but you're not going to get hurt because the message was unclear. So we really just look to our employees that we can only be as good as they are. We provide them with the tools necessary to be successful, but we also need them to speak up when something's out of line.
STEPHEN MASSEY: And I would say, listen, on the opposite side of that, make sure you're actively listening to what other people are saying, whether it's someone from the upper management or someone that is a foreman or a craft laborer. You have to listen to what they're saying. Those are the guys that are going to actually experience a safety issue if we're having a safety issue. Those are the guys we have to listen to. So we spend a lot of time and I spend a lot of time just listening to people and making sure I'm hearing exactly what they're saying.
TONY BOND: And I would just echo what Steve and Greg have shared in just a slightly different light. I mean, there's a lot of smart people in this industry. There's a lot of people who have experienced different things. So I think as long as we're learning from one another and we're willing to share that information amongst one another, that we're all concerned about it, which I think, generally, the industry is generally concerned in different facets and different ways.
How do we share that information so we can all get better? Because it's for the betterment of our industry. It's for the betterment of the people serving this industry. It's for the betterment of the communities that we're building and that we're serving. So I think for all of us, it takes us all being vocal, all being sharing, all listening to each other and saying, hey, here's the struggle that I'm seeing. What are you seeing out there? What are you trying to do? What are you implying? What are you thinking about? Because I think that, as collectively, makes us stronger as an industry.
TONY MILITELLO: So when you talk about collective partnerships and that type of teamwork, how much have you used or leveraged or what experience do you have using your insurance carrier and insurance brokers to help support your team?
GREG HOGG: So right now, we have a standing meeting with our carrier and our broker just to review our current workload and what's coming up and what resources they have available to us. Over the years, we've partnered quite a bit with our broker and just kind of helping us map things out. Our current carrier and our travelers, I'll give them a plug.
They've been fantastic. They have a wealth of information using their systems and having available to all the information that they have available and what they see on similar projects just kind of helps us along. We're not looking for them to do the work, but having them as a sounding board has really been real helpful for us moving forward.
TONY MILITELLO: And Tony, back to you. Anything that you have to add or any final comments that you'd like to make?
TONY BOND: This is a great conversation. It's a wonderful industry to be in. But the challenges that we face, we've been facing it for generations. So for us, it's about really as an industry, again, trying to advance as technology takes a different hold in the organization, as we're able to communicate more efficiently, more effectively. It's on all of us to ensure that we are doing the right thing, that we're sharing that information, and we are all trying to collectively, again, just raise the bar for all of us.
TONY MILITELLO: Great, thanks. Again, and thank you all for your time today and all that you do to demonstrate your leadership and commitment to the construction industry.
MAX NELSON: Thank you for listening to another episode of the podcast series dedicated to winners of the 2024 AGC Construction Safety Excellence Awards. We hope you are taking away insights that can be applied to your own programs and processes. For more information on the CSEA, visit www.agc.org/csea. If you found value in today's episode, don't forget to like and follow the show.
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