Correlation Between Culture, Safety, Profitability, and Growth

There is a high correlation between contractors that have consistently GREAT safety records and consistently GREAT profitability, growth, morale, and talent retention.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

About three construction workers died each day in 2017 and thousands more were injured to varying degrees. This hasn't changed much through 2022. Construction is dangerous and there is no getting around that, however we are a long way from being as safe as we could be.  

Leadership Tools: Safety Compliance will only take you so far. Graph representing correlation between compliance and culture.

We are not specialists in construction safety. We work closely with the management teams of contractors, helping them develop sustainably growing businesses. These are our observations regarding safety:

  • Contractors can only get their safety records so good (EMR +/- 0.9) through compliance activities alone, including complex sets of rules, inspections, and punishments.  
  • Contractors who have consistently GREAT (EMR < 0.7) records focus much more on training, planning, and building a culture where team members care so much about each other that they will not let each other do anything that might cause an injury.  
  • This rigorous level of high-involvement planning combined with disciplined daily execution nearly always impacts every other aspect of the business leading to GREAT performance.
  • The leaders at these companies define the culture by not tolerating bad behaviors around safety and planning which are linked as well as being larger-than-life caricatures modeling the behaviors they want. Remember the spotlight of leadership

 

Learn More:

 

Normalization of Deviance - The Biggest Safety Risk (Video Playlist)

 

 




Prepare Your Business - People
Your people are your business. This is especially true for contractors where nearly 100% of competitive differentiators are the experience of your people. Now we are faced with lots of unknowns and yet we must act decisively.
Evaluation: Stage of Growth + State of Management Team & Systems
Management teams and systems develop through three phases at each stage of growth. Use these 7 steps to evaluate where your team is at.
Decision Quality: Data Points, Accuracy, Confidence, and the Danger Zone
Decision quality IS NOT linearly related to information quantity. In complex environments with elements of uncertainty, data quantity quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns but increases decision confidence, which puts you into the danger zone.