Ask the Expert: Safety Innovations with Keith Haselman
In the latest episode of the Ask the Expert series on the Building Conversations podcast, STOBG’s Senior Vice President of Safety, Keith Haselman, explores the cutting-edge innovations—like drones, wearables, AI, and radar—reshaping how we keep jobsites safe.
HOST
Keith Haselman
SVP, Corporate SafetySTO Building Group (STOBG)
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Ask The Expert:
Safety Innovations with Keith Haselman
Intro: Hello and welcome to Ask the Expert, a series on the Building Conversations podcast, where STO Building Group (STOBG) experts answer questions from our listeners. I’m your host, Keith Haselman, Senior Vice President of Safety at STO Building Group (STOBG). And today we’re going to be talking about safety innovations and construction.
Question one. What made you want to pursue a career in safety? When I entered safety about 37 years ago, I just finished flight school, so safety was really ingrained into us very important, and I wanted to be the operations officer at the new squadron. Unfortunately, that billet was filled, so they placed me in the opening position where a pilot was leaving, and I became the safety officer for the squadron, which I was not very happy about at the time. And up to then, my experience had always been safety persons were selected because they’re either missing a few fingers or they’d had an occupational injury up to that point. But to me, my feelings about safety changed very quickly. I really had an opportunity to take pilots up and test them, and safety through multiple scenarios, simulated engine fires, mechanical failures, et cetera. I worked with the search and rescue team, sending them through problems. How would you rescue these people in these situations? And also with our maintenance crew. So safety was extremely important to our squadron, and that became something that really began my career right there.
Question number two. How have you seen the industry’s approach to safety change over the years? Wow. Initially safety was very compliance based very regulatory. And if things weren’t working out, we created more rules. It was very punitive a lot of ways. And what I’ve seen change over the years is a change to more behavioral based safety, where we really look at engaging the workers, really get that communication, and let’s be honest, people want input into the things that impact them. So we’ve been able to create Safety 360 as part of that change and making sure that people understand that they play a role in this, they’re looking out for themselves and for their colleagues.
Question number three. What are some of the most impactful safety innovations you’ve seen in construction recently and how are they changing the industry? Well, I think some of the most impactful safety innovations are one drone use, which allows us to reach areas high elevations on the building that were basically very dangerous to get to and for our people and for the engineers that had to go ahead and look at the work or the architects and deep excavations where, you know, risking people just isn’t needed. The second one would be wearables, where we start to learn a little bit more about fatigue and heat stress for individuals and how that impact is to our people. And finally we’re getting smarter PPE things that warn you. I’ll give you a couple examples: one is a helmet attachment that shows voltage detection, which is very good during the demolition phases to know that something might be live, it goes ahead alarms, it tells you what direction it’s coming from. Also lanyards that warn you if they’re not connected, as soon as you start elevating their sensors within the equipment that tell you that you’re starting to raise your elevation and that you’re not tied off. So those are things that are starting to turn the industry around, and the number that I’ve seen, increasing number I’ve seen of innovations is pretty amazing right now.
Question number four. Can you share a story or example where a specific safety innovation made a significant difference? Two things come to mind. One already spoke out, which is drones, but the other is ground penetrating radar.
Ground penetrating radar has really allowed us to avoid hitting underground utilities, gas lines, et cetera. It allows us to cut holes through post tensioned concrete which is a very dangerous work. And also to remove the danger of gamma radiation. When we used to use the old x-rays to go ahead and identify what was within the floor, anybody below or in that area could be exposed to x-rays. So that’s made a significant difference to us.
Question number five. How has technology such as wearables or AI enhancing safety on construction site. Wearables are, are giving us an insight into behaviors and physical changes for the worker. And so we’re learning a lot right there in that database. That data set is going to help us in the future understand how we can help those individuals. You know, today we have heat stress rules that OSHA’s been working on for quite a while, but they don’t really understand at what temperatures and humidities, et cetera that really affect these people. So I think the wearables are going to help us get there. They can also warn us that somebody’s fallen or needs help. And the other part is AI and AI is starting to sprout up in a number of areas. One is looking at videos and pictures automatically identifying safety hazards in those monitoring pre-task planning, which, you know, can tell us whether or not there’s great communication, whether that effort’s really being held and we have safety management software that’s allowing us to do that. And finally, we hope that AI is going to really help look at the past data that we’ve had to help us prevent accidents and injuries.
Question number six. What role does a strong safety culture play in reducing incidents? And can you describe a project where fostering that culture really paid off? Yeah, first of all a strong safety culture makes sure that you get the client, the management team, and the workers all on the same page, really working towards the same end. And when you create a culture of caring, all those people are working to protect one another and to look out for one another and it really does change things. And an example I’ll use is one of our 2024 Safety Excellence Award winners. We had the L’Oréal job in New Jersey, and they’d start off a little bit rough and they decided that they were going to go a hundred percent on the Safety 360° culture, and they had their safety stand downs. They had lunch and learns. They really created a reward system for safe behaviors. They really focused on coaching and caring and making sure they got those individuals looking at a positive interaction and really wanting to be there for safety and seeing that there was a significant difference. And it really turned the job around. As a matter of fact, I had an opportunity to directly speak with the client afterwards, and they were just accolades just coming out about how important it was and what a great feeling it was to see such a great safety culture and fantastic outcome as far as safety performance. So I think that is a great example of a job that really brought 100% into the safety culture and made it work.
Question number seven. Are there any safety challenges that are unique to the construction industry today? And how are innovations helping address them? Yeah. In our industry, we are continually working with new subcontractors and new geographies, and there’s always that new communication and working together that happens all the time. So everybody seems to be on a different journey towards safety, in a different place. So it’s unique in every situation. So some of the things we’re trying to do as far as innovation is make sure that we have means to communicate easily. We’re using safety management software that allows people to understand not only what we want, but to actually communicate with us very easily provide documents. And another thing would be the live dashboards, you know, showing us exactly what’s happening all the time. So we’ve continued to develop dashboards that say: “Hey, how is safety performing? How is everything across the board ultimately affects safety?” So if operations are going well, safety typically goes well. If operations are under strain, then you see the impact on safety. And so we’re trying to make sure that we can create a template sort of to make things easier and more consistent across the board with all these differences we see.
Looking ahead, what trends or emerging technologies in construction safety are you most excited about and how do you think they’ll shape the future of the industry? I think the first thing I’d say is we all probably have a good understanding that project demands can shift focus away from safety, and it’s something we want to address as project stressors. I think, you know, this year we’re looking at partnering with field applications, big data, and innovations to look at how we can focus on sectors and similar jobs from the past to help us predict some of the stressors that we’re going to see going forward. We already know that, you know, if you don’t have a competent subcontractor, you don’t select the right foreman and you don’t have a good schedule, those are all types stressors that we’re aware of, that we know we need to really look at the beginning of a job to help that project team reach success.
But some of the other things we might be able to get out is looking at similar jobs and sectors as complicated designs might require a lot more RFIs. Long lead delivery items, just a lot more focus on things we’re not ready for. Maybe it’s working density, maybe it’s the manpower studies, but really allow our BU leaders to look at jobs before they ever start and maybe be able to reduce the number of stressors for that project team to help them get to the end. I think that’s something I’m very interested in, and as we look at the data we’ve already collected and are able to use that going forward, I think that’s going to help.
So that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you all for the thoughtful questions. And as always, thanks for listening.