Wesley Joyce

1. 0:00 What's up, guys?
2. 0:01 So today I wanted to talk about construction site safety orientations.
3. 0:06 I've worked for two general contractors now.
4. 0:09 One site I was on was a $550 million hospital tower that had anywhere from 300 to 500 workers per day on site.
5. 0:17 The second one was a 215 million dollar 18 story higher education high rise building here on Georgia Tech where I go to school.
6. 0:25 And on both of these sites, I was responsible for uh giving the orientations to the new workers that come on site.
7. 0:31 Um, every safety worker or every worker that comes onto a job site, especially these large job sites, um, they have to receive this orientation to be allowed to work on this job site.
8. 0:45 It's standard practice for all general contractors to write this and the contracts of all the work that they sub out.
9. 0:51 Um, and that was my job.
10. 0:53 Every every day in the morning, corraling the new workers, giving them their orientation, uh, documenting them, checking their credentials, and putting that into our systems for our databases.
11. 1:04 And every job site is completely different.
12. 1:08 Um, you know, that hospital was off the side of a highway with truck with cars moving around and you know, heavy, heavy uh car traffic.
13. 1:17 And then I look at my Georgia Tech site and it's surrounded by people changing classes and going to classes.
14. 1:25 That's just an example of how the areas of the world that you're working in can affect that.
15. 1:30 But also none of the work is the same.
16. 1:32 No building looks the same.
17. 1:33 Like if you're working off the side of a building, what's under you?
18. 1:37 On one job site, it may be you know, just the an exclusion zone where nobody can walk into.
19. 1:43 On another job site, it could be your break area, and there could be people actively you know eating down there, you know, hundreds of people taking their lunch break, and you're trying to, you know, um resize some embeds hanging off the side of a building, and you're chipping concrete down onto them.
20. 1:58 So when you give a safety orientation, it cannot be boilerplate and just cover OSHA code and you know your general contractor's requirements.
21. 2:08 It needs to cover exactly what's going on on the site, exactly what the milestones are.
22. 2:14 You know, everybody needs to be on the same page and they need to understand that the path that the project is taking.
23. 2:20 You know, site logistics change 24 7, and they need to understand what areas are safe, what they need to be doing, how they can help other people out, and how they can avoid other high risk areas on the job site.
24. 2:33 And so when you give a site safety orientation, you can't just tell them OSHA code.
25. 2:37 You need to tell them exactly what's different about your site and how they can use that because I promise you they know the code.
26. 2:43 They may not still want to abide by it, but that's why they pay us to manage them, but you need to make sure that they understand the risks that are pertinent to your specific site.