Owners and general contractors currently have no standardized procedure for evaluating potential subcontractors on the basis of their ability to provide a safe work environment for workers.

A Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR) project scheduled to get underway in 2015 will develop and validate a new publicly available pre-qualification assessment tool for construction projects in order to select and promote safer contractors.

According to the abstract, “a few new pre-qualification checklists that examine leading indicators of safety do now exist. However, these programs lack tested validity and often do not capture safety culture.

“Effective programs need to include organizational measures based on how leaders and workers together create and react to their work environment, including safety culture. The goal of the proposed work is develop a pre-qualification assessment tool that demonstrates improvement in the health and safety of construction workers through effective systems of safety that are based on a set of values shared and disseminated throughout the worksite. To accomplish this goal, we will evaluate and review current pre-qualification practices and organizational theory in relation to safety culture and worksite safety performance. To test the validity of this pre-qualification assessment tool, we will implement the pre-qualification tool for all contractors on 25 construction projects in New England and then collect safety performance data for those sites for 1 year following implementation of the pre-qualification assessment tool. Safety performance data will include self-reported worker injury and worksite injury reports, inspection data, and financial data. We will test the hypothesis that sites with better overall pre-qualification assessment metrics have better safety performance outcomes. The impact of this work will be a publicly available, validated pre-qualification tool that adds evidence-based approaches to the health and safety of construction workers. The approach is innovative because it incorporates how organizations value health and safety, demonstrated through their organizational structure (e.g., policies and practices), and how those values create a healthy and safe environment for all workers on a construction site.

“This project will develop and validate a new publicly available pre-qualification assessment tool for construction projects in order to select and promote safer contractors. We expect that the new tool will capture contractors’ values conveyed in their policies, programs, and practices. This will enable contractors to maximize safety management systems in order to better protect the health and safety of the construction worksite.”