Three hazard areas cover most of what goes wrong on a live site. Here is what they look like on a site like yours, and what a crew can practise without losing a day on the programme.
Construction sites, falls from height, slips and trips. Your risk assessment lists them separately. On a site they turn up in the same hour, around the same excavation.
A trench is open that was not there, a delivery is standing where the walkway was, and two firms who have never worked together are both on the slab. Nobody briefed the ground again, because it was briefed once.
Hazard area: Construction sites. The source of the danger moves with every phase of the build.
A scaffold altered by another trade over the weekend, a board over a shaft, a ladder set up for two minutes because the tower is at the other end. In the wind and the wet, and with a load in one hand.
Hazard area: Falls from height. Anyone who has never fallen underrates the anchor.
Banding left where a pack was cut open, a cable run across the route to the mixer, a plank over mud that was fine while it was dry. None of it looks dangerous, and all of it lies where somebody walks carrying something.
Hazard area: Slips, trips and falls. The most common accident type there is, in this industry and in every other.
Of the eight hazard areas, none kills more people at work than construction sites — 63 in a year. It is not one hazard on the list. It is the place the other two happen in.
Germany, statutory accident insurance (DGUV)
A run takes minutes and happens on your own site. It fits into the gaps a working day already has, and it can be done again as often as a crew needs.
Two or three people at a time, in the site cabin, at the briefing, on the day a new phase starts. The situation runs for them and ends when they are done. Nothing on the site is stopped, fenced off or moved back for it.
That is what makes repeating it possible. The same situation can be run again when the site changes, and again on the next job, as often as somebody needs it, and it costs the day the same few minutes every time.
New starters, agency labour, a subcontractor crew who have never been on this site. They go through the same run as your own people, in the week they arrive, instead of waiting until enough names have been collected for a date.
Who took part, on what, and when — by crew and by site, ready to export into the records you keep anyway. Participation, nothing about how a single person did.
These are the ones that fit the work on a site. The time says how long one run takes, from start to finish.
Your shortlist builds itself as you go
Whatever you save here stays in the Shortlist at the top of this page, next to what you saved on the other pages.
We take one hazard from it — the phase, the edge or the ground — and go through the training that covers it, the same way one of your people would.