By eMOD Staff
Recently, eMOD founders Bobby Marshall and Kaitlin Frank joined the X-Factor of Safety show, streamed on several popular platforms, and now available as a podcast. Host Pedro Maciel, a longtime safety engineer, talked with Kaitlin and Bobby about a wide variety of construction safety topics.
During the hour-long show, the three discussed technology and the eMOD Safety app, getting alignment among diverse project teams, transparency across complex projects, and much more.
Listen to the full podcast here:
A few of the takeaways include:
Construction jobs are more diverse than ‘swinging hammers’
Kaitlin, recently honored as one of the 42 most successful women in construction with the Construction Crystal Cube Award, discussed what it was like growing up as a girl in a construction family. As a child, she’d visit job sites with her father, a general contractor. And she knew early on she wanted to work in the industry — which historically has been male-dominated.
“I had that upbringing,” she said. “I never thought that I couldn’t do it. I just did it — not to say I didn’t struggle or that there wasn’t pushback along the way.”
She thinks that the relatively low — but growing — percentage of female construction professionals is in part due to misconceptions about the work. “Construction is more than swinging hammers and moving ladders around. There’s so much more to it these days.”
She said that it’s important for women in construction to find the right workplace. “You have to find companies that want to support you and want to see you succeed,” she said. “I work for Dome construction and they’ve given me every opportunity to grow. If more companies back women, that will ultimately change the industry.”
Talking safety isn’t good enough
It’s unfortunately fairly common for construction workers to say the right things, but not follow through when it comes to using safety best practices.
It’s a challenge to get workers across big projects to completely buy-into safety, and not just give it lip service. Kaitlin said part of the solution is having hard conversations — and not just turning a “blind eye.”
She said she once had a heart-to-heart with a long-time electrician, who was on the verge of retirement, who was refusing to complete some safety paperwork. He told her that he wasn’t going to change the way he’d been doing things for years. “It’s a waste of time,” he told her. “I had to tell him that I wasn’t doing it for him. I wasn’t doing it for me — or for the company. I told him, ‘I’m doing this for your daughters.’ I wanted him to go home safe because I wanted my father to go home safe every day.”
She added, “Telling those stories that explain why safety is important, that’s how we remind people that it’s not just about paperwork. It’s about actual safety. It’s how we send people home safely.”
Safety is more than a management issue
One challenge the construction industry has with safety is the disconnect between the front office and the job site. Much of the paperwork and safety practices are defined and signed by management — but there’s not much transparency for those working in the field.
The eMOD Safety App is designed for entire construction teams — from the general contractor to the trade workers and cleanup crews. “We have profiles of everyone in the job site in the app,” Bobby said. “It’s not just the superintendents and general contractors.”
Everyone involved in a job can access the critical documents and safety plans in the app. That transparency reinforces that “everyone matters,” Bobby said. “We built this to help protect you. I think that it helps align everyone’s values more than a hidden paper process.”
Time is precious. Eliminate the (paper) waste
One constant in construction is time pressure. Projects can’t be done soon enough. And as regulations become increasingly complex, the paperwork involved takes up more precious time.
Bobby mentioned that when he was an intern, he’d spend his mornings shuttling paperwork to be signed on different job sites by different stakeholders. “It was brutal. I’d look at my iPhone app and see I was at 10,000 steps by 7 a.m. — there was so much back and forth with paperwork.”
Worse, he said, is what would happen when 2 weeks later, when he’d need to find a specific paper form amidst binders full of paperwork.
That’s where technology can really help, he said. And that’s a big reason why he and his team created the eMOD Safety App — to provide one place where all safety documents are stored and can be found at any time. “Technology is the solution for documenting safety,” he said.
Don’t just write violations. Celebrate safety heroes
The discussion also touched on the importance of celebrating good safety practices — not just punishing bad ones with safety violations.
Bobby shared that eMOD honors construction “Safety Heroes” every month, highlighting those in the industry who go “go above and beyond to make projects safer for everyone involved” on the company’s construction safety blog.
“It’s important to give out safety recognitions in the field,” Kaitlin said. “I feel like so often we are highlighting the negative. It’s important to give people kudos on a daily basis.”
About 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, subcontractors, and tradespeople. The app includes COVID-19 safety features, such as contact tracing, speedy screening, and jobsite entry, cloud-based documentation, and customizable COVID-19 safety audits.
We not only built the app, we use it every day. Contact us to set up a demo today.