Fatalities caused by falls from elevation continue to be a leading cause of death for construction workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 320 of the 1,008 construction fatalities in 2018 were caused by falls from elevation. All of these deaths are preventable.
In this month’s edition of “What’s Trending in Construction,” we’re focusing on construction sectors that are seeing major growth and success in spite of the current climate. As companies and states learn to deal with major hurdles associated with this pandemic, some are actually capitalizing on the effects, making positives out of a big negative and proving the resilience of American capitalism.
Let’s be honest, we’ve all persevered through the less-than-fun task of creating construction administrative submittals, such as Accident Prevention Plans, Quality Control Plans, and Environmental Protection Plans, along with all of the other more specialized plans. Afterward, we sit and wonder why we like our jobs as construction managers. To make matters worse, we generally wait to begin the task until three days before the drop-dead date, significantly raising the stress level. The experience tends to be an unwanted brush-up course on both Word and Adobe, as the struggle to remember all the forgotten tricks becomes mandatory for survival. It’s during these times that we’ve all wondered why someone hasn’t created a program where you can select the plans that you need, input the necessary data just once, and then let the program generate all of the documents simultaneously—perfect documents that are bookmarked, with pages numbered, and ready for printing. The thing is, someone has created that program. You can accomplish all of this and more with Gadzoom.
According to over 65% of respondents in a recent poll of construction companies, paperwork redundancy was the number one problem facing the industry. It results in more lost and wasted hours and has a larger financial impact on companies’ bottom lines than virtually any other issue.
In late 2019, the outlook for 2020 for the construction industry nationally was positive, although with a much slower expected growth rate. But, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in project timelines and a drop in the sectors’ labor and employment.