TONY MILITELLO: Great, Thanks. In the broadest terms, how important is safety to your organization?
SCOTT FRAZER: Safety for our organization, for us, it starts at the absolute top of the organization. So the support from our president and CEO, our chief operations officer is extraordinary. I actually have never worked for an organization that has such strong support at the executive level for safety.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. So what might be some of the programs that you can tell us about that really put that mantra and that belief into place in reducing operational risk?
SCOTT FRAZER: Yeah. I don't know that it's a program per se, it's more of a mindset. And so what we've understood is that quality safety, productivity, schedule and finance don't live independently on a construction project. Things that happen in each of those areas will affect other areas, so it's a little bit like a Venn diagram.
And so our perspective on this is that if we start focusing on schedule and production and making that flow well, we start focusing on quality, which means that we don't have rework, so our crews aren't touching things three times. They're installing it and walking away.
We focus on safety and making sure that we have the right tools, and equipment, and training for our craft employees. That's how this whole thing comes together to improve safety on a construction site.
We have found that in the old days of safety, we would really drive safety, and what we have found is that there are other areas of the business that affect safety. So we started focusing-- we started to broaden our focus on those areas, working hand-in-hand with each other, in this Venn diagram, if you will, to reduce risk.
TONY MILITELLO: Great, and oftentimes when we think of the term safety, we're all oftentimes thinking of personal safety, the safety of our craft workers, the safety of the people and the individuals on our job sites. Are there other areas of safety or risk that you're concerned with? That has your attention?
SCOTT FRAZER: Yeah, absolutely. So we also have a huge focus on-- well, I mean, from a physical safety standpoint, on client personnel. So we're often working-- we do construction in greenfield sites, but we're also often working with active hospitals.
So we have patient safety to consider, the public to consider, and then when we're in an active plant, we have the facilities' employees who still have their job to do. And so we have to really work in concert with them to make sure that they understand our risks, that we understand their risks as we're working in their facility.
TONY MILITELLO: Are there some risks that you find more unique than others that really have your attention, that you really need to make sure that you pay attention to?
SCOTT FRAZER: Yeah. I think a lot in our health care work. Oftentimes, we could be working one wall away from an active operating room, and so when we talk about ICHRA and Interim Life Safety Measures, there's a lot of consideration that has to be had toward patient safety in health care, for sure. That's a unique risk for us.
TONY MILITELLO: Whether it be in health care or some of the other projects that you have, can you talk a little bit about how technology and innovation contribute to your programs and your management of risk?
SCOTT FRAZER: So we are working with our IT department. So we utilize new metrics for our jobsite auditing software, and we're working with our IT department to build a data pool which the information from our safety audits would go into that data pool, information from a safety standpoint from our craft employees would go into that data pool.
But we would also have those other areas of the business dumping data into this data pool so that we can use generative AI, this is the goal, is to use generative AI to look at projects differently than we do today so that we can really start to understand when a project has a certain trend happening, how that's going to affect-- how it will predictively affect other areas of the project.
So when you talk about reducing risk, there are all kinds of risks, not just personal injury or property damage, and we believe that this generative AI will really help us to reduce the number of incidents that we have to start, and I think as we use it more and more, it will in fact, become predictive.
TONY MILITELLO: That's absolutely fantastic. In terms of safety, what are some areas where you think your organization stands out?
SCOTT FRAZER: I believe, and I've been in safety for quite some time now, and in our organization, I talked earlier about our executive leadership and the support that we have from our executive leaders, and what that does for us is that it opens up an opportunity for us to think differently, because we don't have to fight for doing the right thing.
Oftentimes when you talk to safety professionals, there is sometimes this conflict between the safety professional and upper management, and because we don't have that, it allows us to just go and do new things and try new things.
So one of the things that we're really spending time doing is spending time with our craft employees to understand at the end user, at the task level, where are their pain points, where are their frustrations, what makes things difficult for them, so that we can start working with them.
They are the experts in their field, and so a lot of times our goal is to marry up the safety knowledge of our safety professionals with those task performers to identify new and innovative ways to do things.
And then when we find out that there is something wrong with the tool that a task performer has to use and they're frustrated with it, it's too heavy, it's too bulky, it doesn't do what we need it to do exactly, we have decided that we are not going to settle for the status quo.
We aren't just going to take what the market gives us, and so we go and we meet with manufacturers and ask them to consider changing their tooling, or their PPE, or whatever it is, and we give them the reasons and we give them the research, and a lot of times we've been successful in tweaking little things on tools and equipment to make it easier for the task performer.
TONY MILITELLO: Yeah, that's absolutely fantastic. You know, if you had to think of all the things that you've already mentioned and talked about, if you had to name one single thing that's the most important element for your safety program, what do you think that would be
SCOTT FRAZER: The single most important thing in our safety program is exactly what I just said. I believe that it is working with the task performer. We truly believe that safety can't happen to someone. It has to happen with them because if it's happening to them, you really lack buy in.
It's really difficult to get someone to do the things that we're asking them to do because sometimes it slows down their work, and sometimes it may make a task a little bit more difficult from a schedule standpoint or maybe even a finance standpoint.
And listen, the people that we work with, they take pride in their work. They are excited to be building America, and then you have safety professionals coming in and saying, hey, slow down a minute. Let's do this differently, and so oftentimes, again, there's conflict there.
And so we have said, listen, we're on the same team. We want to make sure that you get to retire with all your faculties. We don't want you walking around with a hitch in your giddy up because of something that you did at work, that's not worth it.
And so when we change that perspective, and we're able to work with our craft employees to improve their lives, I would say by far that's the most important thing. Is being able to build relationships with the people who actually have their hands on the tools.
TONY MILITELLO: What makes you proud to work for The Boldt company?
SCOTT FRAZER: I will say, some of the things that we see at our executive level, that we see at our project leadership level, and that we see at the field level, is a shift in thinking and this migration towards safe thinking, which is, our CEO, Tom Boldt, has done safety speeches at colleges. He is involved in the Wisconsin Safety Council and the Wisconsin Manufacturers Commerce.
We have our president, Dave Kievet, is actively involved in safety. We recently acquired a dirt works company, they also do water and sewer, and we were having just kind of a safety orientation with them. And I was explaining safety helmets and why we went to them a little bit, and there's some controversy over that. It's difficult. It's changed.
And so Dave actually asked me, he said, hey, Scott, can I just interrupt for a second? And I said, yeah, absolutely. And so our president was able to passionately describe why we made the move to helmets, because it was our concern for them as people.
And we understand that change is difficult, and that you might feel a little bit goofy wearing them at first, but it was because we want to make sure that they're taken care of and that they're as safe as they can possibly be. So I am proud of our executive leadership for being that engaged with safety.
And they don't just- they don't just say it, they live it. And then we see this culture shift in our operations management level, at our project executive level, and our PM level, where they're reaching out now to our safety professionals across the organization to say, hey, listen, we've got this thing coming up. Can you help us plan for this?
And that has been a shift over the last, I would say, four or five years, and we're just really starting to get some momentum around that. So I am super proud of the fact that our leadership at all levels are buying into it, and that we have field leaders that are also buying into safety, and that's affecting the lives of the people who are building America. So I'm super proud of that.
TONY MILITELLO: Great. Thank you for your time today. Really appreciate it. And as you mentioned, you and your company, and the leaders there, have demonstrated leadership and commitment to the construction industry, and appreciate your time.
SCOTT FRAZER: Thanks, Tom.
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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