If you have a big industrial construction project coming up, then you will need to choose from industrial construction companies to find one with whom you will want to work to complete the job from the planning stage through to final completion. While industrial construction companies vary greatly in the way they are set up and in their specific specialities, one thing that should characterise all good industrial construction companies is adherence to established safety standards. If you are going to employ a company you must be confident that every task which they carry out will not only be completed to a high standard but will also be completed safely without endangering the workers or members of the public.

Defining workplace safety

There are companies for whom health and safety is largely a box-ticking exercise but it should always be much more than that. Good industrial construction companies will work hard to build health and safety into everything that they do. Two key measures which you can use to assess how seriously they take safety are their Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) data and their Experience-Based Rating (EBR). Between these two sets of data, you should be able to gain a good understanding of the way the company approaches health and safety.

What are Workplace Health and Safety records?

WHS records are a good way of tracking the amount of time industrial construction companies have lost due to recordable incidents. To fully appreciate the information provided by this data you will need to examine an extended period of time so that you can determine whether the lost time was due to a single incident or whether there is a pattern emerging of repeated incidents that could have been avoided by better safety management.

What is the Experience-Based Rating?

When you want to know how good the safety record of a particular company is you can often track this by looking at their EBR. The EBR indicates the workers' compensation loss history of industrial construction companies and compares companies with each other so you can gain a clear picture of the relative safety record of each company.

While these two measures can give you an appreciation of the historical safety performance of industrial construction companies, this should never stop you asking questions about what the company is doing now. You must be certain that the company you choose has effective safety measures in place right now.

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