At COP Construction, Safety Prioritizes People

COP Construction has been a general contractor in the western United States for the past 77 years. The company’s mission is to build meaningful infrastructure projects that support the growth of its people and communities.

Business is like life.

When you set goals to jump-start your health, one of the first things you do is begin to read the ingredient labels at the grocery store, and you learn they are required to list ingredients according to weight. The first item listed has the highest weight of all the other contents in the package and should be considered the most important.

For COP Construction, safety is the company’s number one core value, starting every day with a jobsite meeting. By prioritizing safety first, they can have essential conversations and develop better processes before work begins – pursuing progress over perfection.

Safety is the first consideration

In construction, we encounter unfamiliar environments, heavy machinery, and unsettling dangers that have the potential to create critical injuries, fatalities, and loss. Every COP Construction job considers safety at the bid level to ensure the operational budget accounts for a safe work environment and that potential hazards have a plan.

“Safety is taken into consideration while we’re bidding and designing a project,” says Haley Verhasselt, Vice President of HR & Culture at COP Construction. “We must do everything we can to keep our people safe and do the work. While safety doesn’t go in and write a bid, there is collaboration between the departments.”

Plan for safety

COP Construction adopted a safety program closely following Dr. Matthew Hallowell’s Energy-based Hazard Recognition. This program assumes that all fatalities and critical injuries come from 10 identifiable energies that we can come in contact with – such as gravity, tension, electricity, motion, temperature, and sound. Dr. Hallowell says that more than half of these energies, like compression, pressurized systems, and radiation (that can change temperature), are not easily recognized by the brain without a constant reminder.

To keep these energies at the forefront in the field, COP Construction uses HCSS Safety to embed these concepts into its JHAs, toolbox talks, and custom leading indicators. Internal monthly newsletters to employees reinforce safety concepts through stories, and their President & CEO, Glen Perry, personally reads every incident and near miss so that the field can always have the support it needs to make necessary improvements.

Verhasselt says that in choosing HCSS Safety, they were already using HeavyBid for their estimating and HeavyJob for operations in the field. Adding HCSS Safety meant they could quickly access safety within the same app their field was already using for time cards.

“We were looking for a connection from the field to the office with a smooth transition for managing projects,” says Verhasselt. “Another part of it that I love is the skills tracking, as part of HCSS Safety, and the ability to report safety observations. As a company, we’re still working on embracing that fully, but just seeing the analytics from the data is amazing. We went through them at our recent Senior Management meeting, and it’s really eye opening to be able to see what day in the week and what projects have the more risky components to it.”

Best place to work

Fundamentally, you want support from the top level of the organization, who share your concern for the people in the field. COP Construction is actively making changes, but no one is pushing them to do so.

Ian O’Byrne, HCSS Safety Trainer, helped implement HCSS Safety for COP Construction. While working with them for over a year, he observed that while there is a lot of turnover in the market, COP Construction has good retention. “COP has a good retention rate for employees, and no one is leaving,” says O’Byrne. “A recent study showed that culture, safety, and advancement were among the highest retention factors in the construction sector outside of the dollar. Companies that show they have a safety program typically also have training surrounding it that can improve an employee’s career path. For example, to become a foreman, you might need to maintain a certain safety record and take specific courses.”

“It’s the people here who make COP what it is,” says Verhasselt. “It’s truly wanting each other to succeed and caring that we go home safely. We build really cool projects, and sometimes it’s not the most glamorous work—in sewer, water, and underground utilities. But from sunup to sundown, they’re just hard-working people. So it’s really fulfilling to be part of.”

Data gets better over time

A good safety program doesn’t happen overnight – it is an investment over time. “The ability to generate good data with metrics and graphics that can analyze your incidents and types of incidents for any time of day – that’s something that we’ve never had before as a company,” says Glen Perry. “To have the analytics side of it with HCSS Safety, we can see where we need to get better. We’re only as good as the information that we put into the system. So we’re working towards more engagement. The more involved our people are, helps us generate relevant information that we then can make decisions.”

Perry says that, as a company, they generate a huge amount of data. “Whether it’s job cost data, equipment cost data, or safety data – you name it – we generate it,” says Perry. “But at the end of the day, if we’re not doing anything with all that great data – what is the point in collecting it? That’s something that I feel like HCSS is helping us get better with.”

COP Construction is part of an insurance captive, where a group of companies form a licensed insurance company to provide self-insurance. Many captives need their members to document well, and they are judged on their own safety performance rather than the performance of the industry as a whole. This growing trend enables construction companies with outstanding safety cultures to remain competitive based on their merits.

“We’ve always put a very strong focus on safety because of our insurance structure and because we care about our people,” says Perry. “But I think that having HCSS Safety allows us to collect better data, and have more structure of how we analyze that data to guide our safety program. Then, we can reflect and see how far we’ve come and where we need to go. We want to establish something that we can grow with and can grow with us, and I’ve made that promise to our people that we’re not changing again. And that’s what I love about HCSS – we’re not even scratching the surface – we’re just getting started.”

Want to learn more?

HCSS Safety is a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-communicate app that instantly connects your field to your office so you can make the decisions that can improve the safety of your jobsites. If you have any questions, we can demo how HCSS Safety can help you.