The Power of Visualization – Instilling Safety Excellence in Multinational Workforces at Wind Farm Construction Sites

Abstract

The construction of wind farms involves a mixture of – often centrally deployed – highly specialized experts and local resources depending on the type of activity. The common denominator is that crews are increasingly multinational. For the prevention of accidents and adverse impacts, safety requirements have to be communicated to the workforce in a form which is adequate to the workforce composition and easy to deploy to remote worksites. Field work performed by the authors indicates that visual and/or digital tools for effective safety communication are not yet widely employed, and many field safety trainings and toolbox talks rely on written communication of rules with often repetitive content and no checks of effectiveness. Ways of effective field safety communication are analysed and an approach is presented for enhancing in-the-field conversations and toolbox talks for field sites with limited access to digital learning tools. Simple and easy-to-deploy visuals will remain to be important in-the-field aids for safety communication in remote areas, even as advanced immersive training methods become increasingly available. Any tools should be designed for or should be adaptable to the composition of workforces in terms of language skills, workers qualifications and demographic aspects such as age or diversity. Lastly, field safety communication and training should always be accompanied by personal interactions between workers and supervisors and/or peer multipliers to highlight the “why” behind safety, i.e. the role of every single individual for providing a sound and healthy operating environment and ultimately protecting human lives.