Woodard & Curran holds the health and safety of our employees, contractors, clients, and the public in highest regard. Creating a safe work environment is a key behavior that we uphold as part of our core value to put people first. In our 2021 employee engagement survey, 98 percent of employees agreed that health and safety (H&S) is valued at Woodard & Curran and 96 percent understand their role in maintaining a safe and healthy work environment. Our commitment to training, our incident rate history, and continuous improvement of our systems and indicators reflect these sentiments.
Maintaining focus on individualized training
Since we started comprehensively reporting our H&S training data in 2016, we have grown our employee headcount and continued our focus on providing training tailored to the individual and the work tasks they are performing. We have maintained our overall average of approximately eight hours of training per employee, reaching 10.6 hours in 2022 with a higher number of in-person trainings after a 2020 decrease due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our incident rates reflect our training efforts
Our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) hit record lows in 2022. Since 2016, the TRIR for our Consulting and Corporate Services teams has ranged from 0 to 0.7; though slightly higher in 2021, the 2022 rate was 86% lower than the industry average.1&2 Our O&M business TRIR has seen continuous improvements from the 2016 rate, down from 4.7 in 2016 to 1.0 in 2022; the 2022 rate was 73 percent below the industry average.
With the exception of 2020 when we experienced two ergonomic-related incidents due to the shift in work settings, our Days Away, Restrictions, and Transfers rates (DART) remained zero from 2016 to 2022 for our Consulting & Corporate Services teams. Our O&M DART rate has remained low or at zero since the 2.6 rate was reported for 2016, and in 2022 was 78% lower than the industry average. In 2019, we separated Woodard & Curran Constructors hours worked and incidents recorded, and that business continues to report zero TRIR and DART rates.3
Moving forward: from lagging to leading
Historically, our H&S program metrics had mainly focused on lagging indicators (e.g., the TRIR and DART metrics), which track injuries that have already occurred. While necessary, those indicators alone don’t adequately assess the performance of a safety program. Since the introduction of the Hub, our H&S team has been identifying new and leading safety indicators, i.e., the proactive actions that measure prevention efforts observed and recorded prior to an injury. The introduction of the Hub has provided a platform to continually encourage communicating these instances. To date we have defined nine observation-based, operations-based, or systems-based leading indicators.
Over the next year, as part of our company’s forward-looking strategy to expand our sustainability solutions and commitments, we’ll be reevaluating our strategies and goals. This will include reaffirming the components and efforts that align with our H&S programs and resources, including what we define as our key performance indicators. We will be finalizing which leading indicators have the most impact to drive continuous improvement of the safety program and incorporate those into our future reporting efforts.
Footnotes
The 2021 TRIR industry average for O&M (municipal and private water sewerage industries) is 5.4 (NAICS 221300) and DART industry average for O&M (municipal and private water sewerage industries) is 3 (NAICS 221300). The 2021 TRIR industry average for engineering consulting and corporate business areas is 0.71 (NAICS Code 541300). The 2021 DART industry average for engineering consulting and corporate business areas is 0.31 (NAICS Code 541300).
TRIR is the number of recordable incidents per 200,000 hours worked. DART is based on the number of hours, per 200,000 requiring “days away, restrictions, and transfers.”
Our Woodard & Curran Constructors business delivers design-build projects as the prime design-build entity, in a joint venture with a trusted design-build partner, or as a design subconsultant to a trusted design-build contractor.
