Keith Brown

Keith works with businesses in the north central part of the state. He’s an excellent trainer. His skilled safety assessments of construction sites help employers avoid hazards that can lead to accidents, injuries – and lawsuits.

Talking safety with Keith Brown
Construction Safety
Safety starts with talking – and that’s a good thing! According to Keith Brown, a USF SafetyFlorida consultant based in Alachua County, safety begins by talking with your employees.
Employees know more about what the hazards are and how to correct them than we often give them credit for, he said. One employer he worked with asked his employees to provide him with ideas on how to correct hazards instead of relying on his “management team” to resolve the recognized safety issues. Many employees made recommendations for changes in processes or equipment they had long recognized as needing improvement. Until they were asked to talk about it, they had hesitated to make unsolicited suggestions. Many of the recommendations were implemented and resulted in positive gains in production and employee job satisfaction.
Brown has worked with several construction companies that have been very successful in gaining employee involvement. In all cases, it’s because top management considers safety – not just the financial factor – to be to be a basic measure of the success of their projects. These companies value their employees at all levels. They treat employees as team members and sometimes even as an extended family.
“These employers provide safety training not so much to fulfill any regulatory requirement but as an investment to protect their employees as well as others on their job sites,” Brown said.

Sure Sign of Safety
Want to save money with safety? Perhaps the most common low-cost hazard-reduction actions Brown has observed are housekeeping and in-house employee training on hazard recognition and avoidance. He’s found that if an establishment is kept clean and orderly company personnel are more likely to identify and act on correcting hazards before they become major and expensive issues. He also suggests investing in equipment wherever possible to assist employees in their work to keep them out of harm’s way. If you look for signs of safety in your business, consider one of his favorite quotes: “You may never know when you’ve been too safe; but you’ll always know when you haven’t been safe enough.”