Centered on Safety

Personal experience guides Safety Committee co-chair’s efforts

By David A. James

hat we want is for safety to be part of our day-to-day work. It’s not a separate ‘safety culture.’ It’s part of our overall culture,” Chris Rodriguez says, discussing his career in workplace safety. “It’s a very dynamic field.”

Rodriguez is the region safety manager for Granite Construction in Alaska and co-chairs the Associated General Contractors, or AGC, of Alaska Safety Committee.

“We’re a support group for our projects. We’re just trying to help our employees be in compliance, be safe, and get home at the end of the day safely,” he says.

Rodriguez arrived in Alaska in 2019 after two years as a job site safety manager for Granite in Nevada. He brought a vertically integrated approach to safety, recognizing that weaving safety into company culture requires working with everyone from top management to the most recently hired employee.

“I try to get some involvement with the crew,” he says. “The people that are closest to the hazards are going to have valuable feedback.”

He finds workers are willing to share safety concerns, which helps project teams address potential hazards before an incident occurs.

“That’s been a big part of our success. A successful project is a safe project,” he says.

Rodriguez worked his way into safety from the bottom up. He has a Construction Health and Safety Technician certification, but “honestly, a lot of it came from field experience. I started off in mining at 18 years old as a laborer and worked into different roles,” he explains.

He also turned his attention towards aiding others, working as a volunteer. “Fire fighter, AEMT, rope rescue, hazmat, all that good stuff,” he says. As he acquired more experience, he gravitated into safety work full time.

Rodriguez joined Granite in 2018 and transferred as a safety manager to Alaska the following year. After meeting with the team he’d be working with, he says, “I felt it would be a pretty good fit.”

He joined the AGC of Alaska Safety Committee soon afterwards, where he is now co-chair with Dora Hughes of Knik Construction Co., Inc. Hughes says his “attention to detail and continued support and leadership” on the committee have made working with him a pleasure.

It was Kimberley Gray, the now-retired AGC of Alaska events coordinator, who asked Rodriguez to join the committee. She says he took a proactive approach to the offer, learning all he could about what the position would require to be sure he could meet AGC’s expectations. After joining, she says, he immediately became invaluable.

“He’s a good advocate for the safety committee as a whole,” she says.

Rodriguez says that one area he especially emphasizes is job site safety, something he has a personal connection to. When he was sixteen, his mother was fatally injured in a work zone, and he says that while he didn’t recognize it at first, he now realizes “that was a big factor in getting into the field and wanting to be able to help on the safety side of things and be a resource to our employees and hopefully prevent something like that from happening to somebody else’s loved one.”

Suffering this tragedy in his teens also taught him the importance of working through emotions and life traumas, something that has become a focus of his work in safety.

“The AGC Safety Committee has been mostly focusing on mental health in construction,” he says. “It’s very sad to see the numbers for suicides in the construction industry. They are well above what we see for workplace fatality rates in the industry.”

Through both his job at Granite, as well as with the committee, Rodriguez says he and his colleagues are trying to inform “anyone who will listen” about suicide and mental health in the workplace. They educate employees on how to recognize warning signs in themselves or others and “how to help in those situations, or be a resource to someone who might need help.”

“Even if you’re not a counselor, there’s still stuff that we can do to help our employees,” he says.

The committee has held panels and lunch-and-learns where counselors, pastors, safety professionals, and others—including workers—discuss mental health and suicide prevention.

“We’re trying to normalize the conversation around this stuff,” he says. “It’s a tough industry to talk about feelings.”

Whether it’s mental health, job site safety, or any of many areas where the welfare of employees is imperative, Rodriguez is paying attention and teaching others the importance of doing so themselves.

“We want you to come to work and be healthy,” he says. “And we want you to have a long, healthy life.”