Dome Construction CEO shares how unknowns about project safety performance led to the industry’s most comprehensive safety platform
By Troy Petersen
The story of the eMOD Safety App started with a question. A question that Dome Construction CEO Rob Lynch and his team couldn’t answer.
One day in 2016, Lynch was meeting with one of his vice-presidents and his safety director when he asked how many of the thousands of trade partners working on active construction projects had submitted their proper job hazard analysis reports — and were approved by his team.
“The answer was, ‘Well, they all have.’” Lynch said. “And I said, ‘Well, how do you know?’ I think the response was, ‘Because, it’s our policy.’”
That’s when the lightbulb went on — though, given that the safety of its people is paramount in Dome’s core values, it was more like a flashing, obnoxiously bright yellow hazard light.
“It was a rude awakening,” Lynch continued. “We didn’t know the answer. We couldn’t know because these were paper-borne processes that live in binders — in boxes on construction sites. So it would have taken us days — if not weeks — to verify.”
At the time, Lynch and Dome’s leadership team were also grappling with a second safety-related issue. Daily pre-task plans — which general contractors like Dome typically require from trade partners to understand what’s happening that day on each job site — were also being relegated to dust-collecting binders on job sites. They were never fulfilling their true purpose of identifying the biggest hazards for a wide range of field and trade workers involved in a job — because only a handful of people were actually seeing them.
Meanwhile, field supervisors, who are supposed to sign off on these daily plans, had another problem. One of Dome’s superintendents, Kaitlin Frank — the eventual co-founder of eMOD — brought in binders of examples of these plans that were rarely properly completed with adequate detail She explained to Lynch how she was currently managing three different sites — so it was physically impossible to be in three places at once. She couldn’t possibly review and sign off on the written pre-task plans before work started at each site every day.
“These are industry-recognized best practices but they had this Achilles’ heel that really just crippled them,” Lynch said. “And the fact that as an organization, and as a leader, that we could not tell our people these were being done well every day — that we had zero capability to monitor them and correct safety issues — that was unacceptable.”
The hack and the search
With a couple of problems clearly identified, Dome’s leadership team set off to find a solution. They needed a tool to add transparency to these paper-based planning processes so that anyone, anywhere, could access the relevant information and documents on a computer or mobile device.
As a proof of concept, eventual eMOD co-founder Bobby Marshall built a “hack” using an existing construction management tool. He created a basic safety inspection module superintendents could use to perform and record weekly safety audits.
“For the first time ever, we could see that every job, every week, was having this function performed at an acceptable level,” Lynch said. “And the issues and items that were brought up through these audits were getting resolved. That transparency was really awakening and was driving measurably improved performance.”
The hack served its narrow purpose, but the team wanted a more robust, comprehensive platform for all the safety processes and information that would assure positive safety performance. In part, the motivation was so they could more efficiently comply with regulatory requirements. More importantly, they wanted a project’s safety process to happen consistently, at a very high level of quality, with the resulting information accessible to all the various field and trade workers who are involved in sometimes massive projects. They wanted all the critical safety information on workers’ phones and devices that are ubiquitous on today’s construction sites.
They also wanted a tool that could digitize the “proactive safety processes that we have,” Lynch said. “The things that if we do them well, we won’t have safety incidents. We won’t expose our workers to hazards and put them at risk.”
So, Lynch’s team researched the universe of available digital solutions, both within the industry and outside of it. But there simply wasn’t a tool like this available.
“It was unacceptable,” Lynch said. “Technology is being rapidly deployed for almost every aspect of our business — except for the one that’s the most hazardous, safety. The one that ultimately makes the biggest impact on people.
“So we decided, ‘All right, we’re going to make our own.’ And that’s what we did.”
Built for the field, by the field
Successful products typically solve some kind of problem. On occasion, the people experiencing those problems are the ones who actually step up and build it. eMOD, which would later become an independent company, was started by a team of field workers and management within Dome — all of whom were passionate about safety. And appropriately, a popular mantra within the company has become, “Built for the field, by the field.”
Of course, while building structures is no problem for the veteran construction team, designing and developing an app was all new territory.
“We aren’t a tech company that built a construction product,” says co-founder Frank. “We’re a construction company that built a tech product.”
With the help of an external software development firm, the internal team embarked on an agile, iterative development process that continues to this day. At each and every step, the team captures feedback directly from a range of construction workers and management using the eMOD Safety App, from the job site to the office.
Early on, a big focus was getting feedback from construction workers with varying levels of comfort with technology — especially important in a somewhat tech-resistant industry of builders. The interface, Frank said, had to be designed in a simple way so it would take only a matter of a few minutes for workers to set up and understand.
Another big advantage of building their own app was that team members understood all the varying conditions workers experience at different job sites.
“Knowing how things worked in the field was crucial,” Lynch said. “Things like how some job sites don’t have great light, and that there’s a lot of noise and dust. Understanding those conditions was really important to the design of the app.”
As the app started to take shape, it was commonplace to roll out a new version, push it out to a small group of field crews and supervisors, rapidly collect feedback, and make changes. A continuous feedback loop — with rapid changes and improvements.
“We were able to make incremental improvements quickly, directly from the foreman’s mouth to our developers,” Frank said. “It wasn’t weeks or months, it was days, sometimes even hours.”
Gaining momentum
Like all great software, the eMOD Safety App is living — it has continued to mature and improve through an interactive process. Near the end of 2018, the team behind eMOD officially incorporated, becoming independent from Dome. And in early 2020 — around the time the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S. — the eMOD team reached a couple of important milestones.
- All new projects led by Dome Construction were actively deploying the eMOD Safety App — across internal teams and trade partners. The app currently has thousands of users across 45 Dome active projects.
- The eMOD team began offering the app for sale and pilot to other construction firms. Across the construction ecosystem, more than 10,000 users and 500 companies have used the app to date.
Speaking of the pandemic, there’s no denying the impact of COVID-19 on the industry. Outbreaks and local regulations stifled some projects and led to costly delays on others. The eMOD team responded by quickly rolling out a COVID-19 update complete with contact tracing, screening and job site entry, cloud-based documentation, and customizable COVID-19 safety audits.
Those COVID-19 features helped capture the attention of Constructech magazine, which named the eMOD Safety App as one of the construction industry’s seven top new products.
“Kudos to eMOD for bringing to fruition a comprehensive safety platform that facilitates and quantifies safety practices,” said Peggy Smedley, editorial director of Constructech. “Also impressive is its responsiveness in building key features that address the COVID-19 pandemic. Congratulations eMOD, a Constructech Top Products 2021 winner.”
Looking back: Are we good or are we lucky?
Now, at any time from anywhere, Lynch and his executive team can check the eMOD Safety App and answer those two questions that started his team’s journey. He can verify that the best practices with the highest impact on safety performance are occurring every day. At a high level of quality. On every project. By every team member. When there are issues, teams are held accountable to deploy corrective measures, driving continuous improvement of both safety and project performance.
More importantly, every member of an active construction team can understand the hazards of their upcoming work — and take the necessary steps to prepare for them.
Thinking back to his team’s execution on safety practices before the app, however, begs another question he can’t answer. When it came to safety, for which Dome Construction’s reputation has always been among the best, “Are we good or are we lucky?” Lynch asked.
“You want to have a really good answer to that question,” he said. “But if somebody asked if we were lucky or good at safety, I’d have to say, ‘both.’ I don’t know how much of one versus the other. And that’s what I find so gratifying about what we have now. I can look at the app and say, ‘I know we’re good’ — as opposed to saying, ‘I hope we’re good.’”
Now he knows. And he’s quick to remind people that it’s not just about completing papers and understanding the status of various safety processes. The team wants to ultimately make one of the most dangerous professions significantly safer.
“Every corner of our operations weighed in on it and helped to make this a great product,” he said. “And it’s really gratifying to see everyone get behind the mission. We want to send people home safely, in as good of condition as they came in on a given day.”
eMOD
Founded in 2017, eMOD is a team of experienced commercial construction superintendents, project managers, and safety officers from San Francisco-based Dome Construction. Safety is more than our passion; we’ve built a company and a product dedicated to making our industry safer. The eMOD Safety App is designed for the next generation of construction owners, insurance companies, general contractors, and trade partners. We not only built the app, we use it every day. Contact us to set up a demo today.
Troy Petersen is an editorial consultant with eMOD.