Damian Alvarez got into construction as a 14-year-old who just needed to make some cash. He took an under-the-table job to pay for summer school, but after several months of putting new shingles on roofs, he’d found a lifelong love for working with his hands.
Fast forward several years into his time at the University of Texas at El Paso: Damian and his longtime girlfriend got married and decided to leave El Paso and move to Atlanta. He got a labor job with MA&O Construction, where he climbed the ranks after the owner noticed he was bilingual.
“We were a subcontractor, so we had contracts with very big companies and they started to ramp up their safety and what they were expecting of their subcontractors,” Damian says on this episode of the No Accident podcast, presented by TRUCE. “He said ‘Hey, you went to school — would you like to go back and learn about safety?’ And I said sure.”
He became the company’s safety director and never looked back. Currently, Damian is Environmental Health & Safety Director at Jordan Foster Construction LLC, and on this episode, he discusses how his position requires him to work closely with everyone from the executive team to the employees in the field to facilitate an engaging safety program with buy-in on all fronts.
By focusing less on compliance and policing his employees and more on mentoring them on why it’s important to be safe, Damian is able to get everyone on board. This in turn helps business because if a construction group doesn’t have a good safety record, it won’t get more work.
“We're changing more into a coach. Like we’re talking about … ‘OK, why did you do this? Let's see how we can do it better,’” Damian says. “A great safety leader is that they’re a leader. That person is building other leaders. … I tell my team, ‘I want you guys to be better than I am.’”
Featured Guest👉 Name: Damian Alvarez
👉 What he does: As Environmental Health and Safety Director at Jordan Foster Construction LLC, Damian uses his background in construction to facilitate an engaging safety program that’s not just focused on compliance.
👉 Company: Jordan Foster Construction LLC
👉 Key quote: “It's not always just about safety. It’s how can we improve and how, if we could have mitigated an issue before something happened, … not only would somebody not have gotten hurt, but we're actually saving this amount.”
👉 Where to find him: LinkedIn
Safe Takes⚠️ Make safety a priority by engaging your employees. Damian says he gets team members to buy in by talking to them effectively — and a big part of that is not focusing every training around compliance. Instead, he focuses on the everyday importance of safety and what can happen when fellow team members aren’t being safe.
⚠️ Work with the C-suite to gain their support. Damian says everyone from the executive team to the field teams buy in at his company, which is largely because his team has created a culture around safety that’s more like a journey, bringing new people along for the ride.
⚠️ Safety is about more than mitigating risk — it’s about mental health. Damian argues that construction workers are often viewed as tough, strong men who we don’t have to worry about. But the reality is that their jobs are stressful, and facilitating a mentally healthy work environment makes for a safer work environment.
Resources⛑️ LivingWorks ASIST — The Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) course that Damian’s entire safety team has taken.
⛑️ Guts, Grit & The Grind: A MENtal Mechanics MANual: Basic Mechanics — The book that Sally Spencer-Thomas, the writer Damian is working with, is known for.
Top quotes from the episode:“We're looking at everything as a whole. We're working together [the safety and risk department] to see how anything is going to affect us and then how we can mitigate it.”
“I think a lot of safety guys get stuck on compliance. … Compliance is good, but I think to the average worker, to the average team member, they don't know the CFR, they don't know the ANSI codes. They just want to work. They just want to do their job. And most of them want to do it safely. So how we try to do it is we’ve got to get the buy-in.”
“I think a lot of times people get stuck in just training about safety — just safety, safety, safety — but you have to learn how to talk to them. You have to be engaging to the people you're trying to reach. … If you're just about compliance, I don't think that buy-in is there.”
“If we don't have a good safety record, we might not get any more work or get to do certain jobs. … So us all working together, all our levels of leadership from the top all the way to the field, that's where I think a lot of people don't see that their leadership is there, too. So all of those aspects working together is impacting our safety record in a good way. And we can see the downward trend.
“Most people say they don't like change. ‘I don't like change, I don't want to change this, I don't want to change that.’ That's the way we've been doing it, but most people truly do like change. It's just the why they want to change. And too many times we focus on the what … what they're doing, but let's change. Let's get them to buy into the why they need to change and how it's going to affect them.”
“That's one of our other initiatives that I think gets overlooked a lot in our industry — the mental well-being of everybody in construction. Especially because construction workers look like big burly, guys building things, so [we think] they're OK. But a lot of times, these guys spend a lot of time away from home — they travel a lot and they don't see their family a lot. And the stress of the job is sometimes kind of hard.”