Mandy Bujold's Column August

Construction has always been an industry built on safety. Every day on job sites, safety is front and centre. Your team wears hard hats, uses fall protection, follows procedures, and continually works to reduce risk. Those measures matter because they save lives.

But what if safety is only part of the equation?

I’ve found myself asking a different question lately. Are we only focused on preventing injuries, or are we equally helping them stay healthy?

As someone who spent years training as a high-performance athlete, I learned that success wasn’t just about avoiding injury. It was about taking care of my body, recovering well, fueling properly, and building habits that allowed me to perform at my best over the long term.

Construction isn’t all that different and I believe there’s an opportunity to bring more of that mindset into construction. 

The work on-site is physically demanding. It requires strength, focus, and resilience day after day, year after year. So while regulations help protect workers from immediate hazards, we also have an opportunity to think about their long-term health. Are we creating workplaces where people can build not just successful projects, but long, healthy careers?

That means thinking beyond compliance. It means encouraging proper recovery, supporting mental well-being, recognizing the effects of fatigue, and creating a culture where asking for help is viewed as a sign of strength not weakness.

Recently, through my involvement on an industry committee with the IHSA focused on mental health and suicide prevention, one speaker shared a perspective that has stayed with me. If multiple planes crashed in a short period of time, the entire industry would mobilize overnight to understand why and prevent it from happening again. But many of the challenges affecting workers’ mental health happen one person, one family, and one community at a time. Since they aren’t experienced as a single catastrophic event, they often don’t receive the same level of urgency or attention. That doesn’t mean they’re any less important.

The construction industry has always been built on looking out for one another. Perhaps the next evolution of safety is making health just as much a priority as compliance—not because regulations require it, but because we genuinely care about the people who make this industry what it is.

At the end of the day, the goal isn’t simply that everyone goes home safely. It’s that they go home healthy, and are able to come back tomorrow feeling strong, supported, and ready to build again.