The construction industry is a big industry in the United States and provides work to over 11 million people each year. People in this field will work on roads, buildings, bridges and everything in between and often he conditions will be hazardous. In fact, these conditions are often so hazardous that construction workers make up 22% of those who are hurt in the workplace. If you are in charge of maintaining the workplace safety for your construction workers, here are some steps that you should take to ensure that everyone is staying safe and that you have fewer personal injury claims to deal with.

Have Safety Plans in Place

The first thing that you will need to do is look over your current safety plans and decide if they hold up to the standards that are to be met. Even if your safety plans hold up to OSHA guidelines, you can still look and see if there are any holes in the safety plan that you can iron out ahead of time. The safer you can make the worksite, the better off your employees will be since there will not be as many accidents.

Provide Proper Training

It does not matter how great your safety plan is if none of your workers have the proper training in order to work with it. For each new worker, you need to provide them the training to use the tools and equipment that will be a part of their job. If new equipment is being implemented into the site, make all workers who will be around it have the proper training before going back to work. Many accidents could be prevented if the employee just knew how to properly run the tools they were using.

Perform Consistent Inspections

Machinery can get old and faulty, making it not work the way that it is supposed to and causing a lot of glitches in your plans. When a worker expects a machine to function in the proper way and it doesn’t do that, then the worker can get hurt. You should make sure and have a plan in place that will include replacement, repair, and regular maintenance of all the equipment on the site.

Post Warnings for Workers

Safety warnings should be posted all around the workplace in order to let the workers know how to remain safe in their environment. Keep things like the Material Safety Data Sheets out where employees can find them and let them know they can always ask questions if something confuses them.

Maintain Proper Records

If an accident does occur on the work site, it is important that you collect all of the important information about the accident so that you can have it available later. While most of these accidents will not end up as personal injury cases, you can always go back through the files and evaluate the types of accidents that have been occurring on the worksite. Use these evaluations to make modifications to your safety plans and prevent injuries happening again.

Jennifer is a legal blogger for Loewy Law Firm, a person injury lawyer in Austin, Texas.  She admries the work of construction workers and knows there are plenty of risks involved.