Customized Reporting, Safety Helmets Lead Charge Toward Zero Harm

Excellence in occupational safety and health is a crucial component of TD’s culture that includes our ZERO Harm safety vision of performing work that results in no Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIF).

In 2022, our core value to fiercely protect the safety of all included optimizing current technology to record 200,000-plus electronic safety processes captured through our safety app and allow for more meaningful daily planning conversations. TD is setting the standard for innovation in safety in many areas, including safety engagement focus and safety helmets.

Customized Observation Reporting

TD continues to optimize the use of SmartTagIt on our Safety Engagement Journey. SmartTagIt is an integrated, customizable safety app that replaces much of the paperwork needed for pre-task safety plans, inspections, work permits and safety observations, all housed in a social media style feed that’s easily accessible to the project or team for process visibility and hazard awareness.

Disrupting the pre-task safety planning (PTSP) process has been a worthwhile journey. Six months into the video-based planning processes, the team began to see the need for improvement in writing plans. The team worked with the app developer, and 10 safety managers scored 2,000 text-based PTSPs to teach the model how to score those written plans. Now the team is scoring and improving on two different metrics associated with pre-planning: writing great plans and leading great daily planning conversations.

Before 2019, TD captured 12,000 safety observations per year and had limited visibility to other safety processes. But with SmartTagIt, that number has increased to 176,000 in 2020, 189,000 in 2021, and more than 200,000 projected in 2022. With the reporting capability from the safety app, the team has been able to improve quality, at-risk safety observation percentages and more.

While observations were once separated into eight rigid categories, TD employees now have the capability to input free-form text they deem best fits their observation, and the artificial intelligence will categorize natural language and unstructured data into intelligent reporting. With the video- and photo-based social tool, TD can measure safety risks, stay ahead of new problems that are being unveiled and move forward in the march toward ZERO Harm.

Safety Helmets

Safety helmets were introduced in the industry around 2015. While they didn’t gain much traction then, they are now quickly becoming the standard in preventing SIF-related fall injuries.

TD is introducing safety helmets to better protect against major injuries from dropped objects or falls. The traditional hard hat, now a 50-year-old technology, can come off during these events, causing unnecessary injuries and hospital visits.

TD’s safety team and key leaders began wearing safety helmets in 2021. On those helmets were QR code stickers that allowed interested employee-owners to sign up or request to be upgraded to a safety helmet. Some of the key benefits to safety helmets include:

• Protection against side impacts (compared with only vertical impacts with traditional hard hats)
• A chin strap, which helps keep the helmet on during a fall event
• Improved design and better impact protection
• Improved comfort