Remote Construction Site Monitoring, Part 2: Automating Compliance, H&S and Security

Matthew Ramage

Keeping people safe has always been a core priority on the construction site. By limiting who is on site and confirming those on site have passed safety training, attended safety briefings, passed background or drug checks, with the ultimate goal of limiting injury incidents. Traditionally, construction access control was managed by having someone stand at a gate or a break in the fence line.

What if this could be automated? What if you could ensure that fewer people get through the gate when the guard isn’t looking, or on a break? What if you could make sure that everyone who comes onto the site has every mandatory piece of training and documentation you require and that it’s up to date?

Many construction sites are deploying systems which are able to automate these compliance, safety and security measures, helping to keep people on site safe as well as positively impacting any risk and liability concerns owners and general contractors have.

To do this, you need a system, like CrewSight, which takes your site rules and has every worker enroll, submitting and signing all of their documentation; this same system can then also track entry onto the site. Once a worker attempts to enter, the system will check that all of the mandatory site rules are met and up-to-date. If anything is missing or old, the system will either bar their entry to the site or alert someone to the issue. This removes the need for any security guards to manage these checks or for admin workers to have to check for OSHA card expirations — the system does it all.

Enforcing site rules while managing change

As we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic jobsites needed to quickly adapt to the rapidly changing environment and enforce those rules and checks across an entire site. For example, many sites implemented complete wellness questionnaires, temperature checks and more that needed to be done every few days. This is an administrative task which could consume many hours each week. To improve this process, using a system which allows you to manually make changes, to add/remove/change questions and requirements whenever you need and have them roll out through the project instantly can help alleviate this administrative task

For instance, after creating these rules as needed, workers could then use tablets at safety meetings to update their records and keep all of their checks and waivers up-to-date and you can be sure that everyone that’s on-site has permission to be there, giving you peace of mind when you can’t be on site.