Safety is the cornerstone of any successful construction business, especially in the solar industry where workers are exposed to various hazards – like working at heights and electrical hazards – on a daily basis. If you are a leader at your organization (and aren’t we all in some capacity?), it is your responsibility to foster a safety-minded culture from the top down. 

In this blog post, we hear from HeatSpring instructor Tripper Gawan as we explore the importance of safety and how company leaders can set the tone for their employees.

This blog is a part of a series on solar construction safety. In case you missed it, here’s a link to the first post – Why Do Companies Need a Safety Program?  If you’d like to dive deeper into these topics, check out Tripper’s course Solar Construction Safety. 

So the safety program inevitably has to start with the person who’s creating the company. The CEO, the COO, the owner operators. They have to have a safety-minded focus in order to ensure that they’re building all the healthy arms of the business. Safety is paramount in that if your employees aren’t safe, they can’t return to work.

You can’t keep your profits going. So it’s very important in the line of  top down, bottom up expectation that the owners operators are all engaged with what the safety program and what the safety expectations are.

They literally start by being safe. So first thing that they can do is get a certification, such as OSHA 10. OSHA 30. There’s obviously our wonderful course that we offer here on HeatSpring for Solar Construction Safety, and you can just start building the repertoire of skills and knowledge to ensure that your employees in any facet or facility that they’re managing for field installation, that they’re taking the proper safety protocols in hand.

And as the course outlines, the very first thing that they can do is identify what hazards could potentially be on the construction site and build off of that, because some people, maybe they’re only doing solar service. It’s a little bit different of a nuance for their specific business model. In conjunction with someone who’s doing full gamut of electrical service changes, they’re doing ground mounts and they’re doing three story S tile roofs. Their situation is going to be slightly different than that of a service technician. 

So again, how they start, it’s going to be a little bit conditional based on what type of business they’re running. But it really really does start from the top down first because every employee that comes in is going to get that indoctrination into what safety expectations and safety culture are there at that company.