But hoping for a strong safety culture isn’t enough make it happen on complex, constantly shifting data center megaprojects. Multiple general contractors working on different projects with different sets of responsibilities creates a tangled web of accountability for safety training and management. General contractors across the industry are seeing their safety approaches tested by this booming sector. 

"On a normal commercial construction job, like say a big $200-million hospital, you do $15 million a month in construction,” says Hutson. “But on hyperscale data centers ... we do $60 million to $70 million in work in place in billings in a month. If you approach that with an old school mentality, you will continue to come up short on preventing injuries. It’s very reactionary.”

There’s no panacea for instituting a safety culture, but with multiple projects showing signs of stress and possible conflicts in how safety was being enforced on site, he turned to Caterpillar Safety Services, which JE Dunn has used in the past for safety training during subcontractor onboarding.

An Outside Perspective on Safety Management 

It might seem odd that an original equipment manufacturer like Caterpillar has an in-house safety culture consultancy, but it has allowed the company to offer a different kind of help on the jobsite. Not linked to any Caterpillar equipment purchase or rental, Caterpillar Safety Services offers safety evaluations and training, from existing modules and programs to bespoke packages to meet the needs of contractors. And data centers projects have come calling lately.

“In our conversations with contractors representing six of the biggest data center companies, all of the intel that has flowed in over the last two years has similar themes—around error precurors and near-misses” says Justin Ganschow, business development manager for Caterpillar Safety Services.

While it’s a part of the equipment manufacturer’s larger global business, the safety unit isn’t tethered to Caterpillar’s equipment customers or its dealer network. Instead, it offers its training and evaluation services as a standalone service to contractors and their subcontractors. Ganschow notes that while the safety unit has consulted in industries from mining to manufacturing to some of the most high-risk sectors of construction, the data center building boom brings its own set of challenges.

“What we’re hearing from [data center contractors] is they are seeing what we call error precursors,” he explains. This covers behaviors that don’t necessarily rise to the level of a recordable incident or a formal reprimand, but are the kinds of actions and warning signs that can precede serious safety incidents: miscommunications that waste time and put workers in the wrong place; near-misses on collisions and falls; and other small mistakes that pile up due to stress and fatigue.

“Right now data center owners and clients are driving different expectations on safety—some are hyper-focused on recordable injury rates, which is missing out on the ‘stuff that can kill you,’” says Ganschow. The debate over recordable injury rates (RIR) versus the more modern evaluation on the "stuff that can kills you" (often abbreviated STCKY) has been ongoing in the construction field, but Ganschow says Caterpillar Safety Services has embraced the STCKY philosophy, especially on large, complex projects and deployments. 

“Some of these [data center owner] clients do put pressure on the contractor to reduce the [RIR], but there are mixed messages," he explains. "For example: one contractor talked to the owner for about 20 minutes on safety and then spent over two hours on schedule, so safety feels like a box-checking activity to some of these folks. That downward pressure on schedule is causing a lot of negative responses in the field.”

And while it's larger contractors doing most of the data center work (a recent ABC survey found contractors with over $100-million in revenue are getting the largest share of data center work) even a robust established safety program can come under strain when working on hyperscaler data centers. 

Ganschow says operating at full capacity can strain existing programs. “What I keep hearing is that these [large contractors] are running out of capacity and can’t manage any more projects.” And this can make early precursors of unsafe practices harder to detect. “One of the big general contractors told me, we do big projects, but this [data center] work we do now is two or three times the work we’ve done before,” he says. “We did a safety perception survey for a GC with 90 subcontractors—how do you layer a safety culture across 90 companies?”

Focusing on What Works

Solutions to these safety concerns are not easy but there are approaches that have shown results. JE Dunn’s Hutson says he like the Caterpillar Safety Services approach since it aligns with something he believes: safety can’t be on it’s own track, it needs full buy in from operations. 

“If the operations leadership is not bought in on safety, you’re gonna have safety cops, and all they get is a bad reputation, you become an enforcement arm without recognized authority,” says Hutson. But if you can get the superintendents and project managers on board with safety, it goes down the line, he says. “Workers respect the super that leads the project and puts work in place, so if they saying and doing [these safety practices], the craft [workers] emulate that and do what they do. It sounds pretty simple, but most things can be simple and still take leadership.”

Graphic courtesy Caterpillar

Hutson says instead of just delivering flyers and reminders to staff, the Caterpillar safety program encourages project managers and superintendents to get directly involved in safety enforcement. "Our PMs and supers have to be focused on safety [as much as] the schedule. They're better equipped than outside consultants to identify hazards—many of our supers came up through the trades, so they understand how to connect and make things understandable to the craft [workers]."

Caterpillar's safety program works best when it's built in from the start, Ganschow says, but they have been called in to ongoing projects to overhaul safety programs. It starts with workshops at every level of the job, and workers are asked to rate their bosses on safety to find where the lapses in leadership are. But it can't stop there, he adds. "If we just do a workshop to check boxes nothing changes. They're not happy, and it hurts our reputation." 

The initial assessment is followed up with onsite interviews, analyzing the safety approach across 11 cultural indicators Caterpillar Safety Services has identified. Incident reports are looked at as well, and workers are asked how they responded. Ganschow says the goal is to encourage workers to speak up about problems and not fear retribution. "We call it Speak Up and Listen Up. We want craftworkers to give and receive feedback and not be afraid of the safety cops." Cat conducts bilingual training courses for workers on site, and puts frontline supervisors through training on root cause analysis, helping identify precursors to safety incidents. 

And it also take change at the top, with a day-long training course for senior supervisors and project managers. "For that top layer, we look at how humans work: why we make mistakes, how to learn from those involved to improve our system, and how it reacts to change," says Ganschow.

Hutson had Caterpillar Safety Services training on one of his data center projects for about eight months and was already seeing real results. And while the approach can seem simple, it's the dedication to implementing it that makes it work, he says. "We are doing great in the age-old RIR, but more importantly doing great in executing work safely." He says he plans to roll Cat's safety approach out across all of JE Dunn's data center work this year, with craft workers not getting to work until they complete a day-long course and superintendents not allowed to work until they complete a three-day course. 

"These hyperscalers have multiple GCs doing their work, but it's a very collaborative group," observes Hutson. And when these jobsites can have thousands of workers on site and multiple overlapping layers of management, there's no time to get precious about proprietary solutions. "We don't really have trade secrets when it comes to safety. We share openly and willingly if it works. With where it's going with the strain on the labor market and pressure on materials and equipment, we're all going to have to collaborate more and more."