Pub. 2 2019-2020 Issue 2

17 The important thing is not to be reactive. You don’t want to be dealing with problems when they take place. Instead, you want to try to be ahead of the game. Doing that is the ultimate win. example, but we also need to get employ- ees to be part of the process. That means we don’t just talk about safety, and we don’t care about it just when there’s going to be an inspection. It has to be part of my top two or three goals every day. I check in with people and try to make sure I am talking to them about the right things. Every company is going to have a differ- ent take on a safety program. The impor- tant thing is not to be reactive. You don’t want to be dealing with problems when they take place. Instead, you want to try to be ahead of the game. Doing that is the ultimate win. When do you find time to train people about safety? It’s hard to get the guys in one room and have a safety meeting. Sometimes we hold individual safety meetings while they are eating their lunch. It’s important for them to see that I am engaged in this. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it. What if people don’t care? You do what you can to set an example, train employees, and follow through. If that doesn’t work, you should have pol- icies and procedures in place so that if some employees don’t share your values about safety, you can let them go. What was the response to the session about addiction? Paul has personally struggled with addic- tion and was able to speak with cred- ibility, grace, and integrity. He has an amazing story himself and could really talk to the people who were there about their problems. He gave us a lot of very specific statistics. For example, he told us that the construction industry is second only to mining in terms of the number of people who struggle with addiction. He had some astonishing statistics. We got a lot of positive feedback at the end of the session. A handful of attend- ees talked to Paul for about 30 minutes after it was done. What’s your perspective about addiction? Personally, I’ve known addiction to be a problem for some good friends of mine who work in construction. Construction is a tough industry that has a lot of stress, mentally and physically. People have to work a lot of hours; they can get injured. These guys have a physically andmentally hard job. A lot of them are road warriors who work until they just can’t anymore. They love what they do, they’re good at their job, and sometimes they become addicted. They need help and support, not judgment. What do you think about smart roads and safety? It’s cool. The people who are working on smart roads are trying to reduce acci- dents. Of course there are growing pains, but as long as you aren’t driving a 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle, hopefully everything is updated in your car so at least you don’t have a lag in that. The process is going to involve a lot of communication between all vehicles, all intersections, freeway on ramps, etc. Full autonomy won’t prevent accidents completely as long as you still have people behind the wheel. But the technology is changing quickly. At some point we’ll have cars on the road with no drivers. There are a lot of issues to work out. Are all the cars going to be the same? How will they be regulated? People will have to answer a lot of questions, but in the end, we’ll have better technology in everything we have. The experts are trying tomake work zones smarter and safer, and as a result of that, you already get live feedback with the message boards you see. An example of this is we can log in from our desk com- puter to a message board in Moab and make changes to the message and diag- nose other technical issues. Nobody has to touch it once it is set up. That helps our contractors because they only need to worry about charging batteries. They no longer have to request us and pay extra money for my crew to drive 200 miles to change a message. That is a savings to our customer and safer for my drivers to not have to make that long drive. I do think privacy is a big concern with smart roads. What information is being gathered and who gets to see it? The people collecting that information need to be constantly mindful of people’s privacy, and communicating with cars needs to be especially private. If it is, then it can be great for traffic control. I’m very old school, though. I am usually suspicious about things until I can gather my own information and see actual proof. 3