A site safety manager on a $500 million heavy civil job, on why real protection is built in layers, not shouted from a book. 

“I‘m selling them safety, whether they want safety or not.” 

Andrew Absher is a site safety manager on a heavy civil construction project in the Virginia Beach area of Virginia, and by the numbers he rattles off, the job is enormous. A project worth around half a billion dollars. More than 300 workers on his site. Roughly 125,000 members of the public driving straight through it every single day. He is the only safety representative for all of them. What makes that remarkable is that until this job, he had never worked a single day with “safety” as his actual title. 

He started in construction at 13, picking up nails, trash, and scrap two-by-fours for a couple of residential contractors who happened to be his neighbors. Most kids, he points out, say they want to be a police officer or a firefighter or an astronaut. He always gave a different answer. “I want to build houses. That’s what I always said from the time I was a kid.” He got his wish and then some, working his way up through residential, then electrical, then large commercial jobs: universities, hospitals, schools, projects he describes as “almost billion-dollar.” And on every one of them, he was the guy who got teased for it. “I always got made fun of because I was always the most safety conscious out of everyone.” When a crew needed someone to unofficially watch the safety side, he was the one picked, every time, without asking. “My brain naturally went to the safety part.” 

The turn came from an unlikely place. He left the field to run an elevator company, overseeing thousands of elevators and the crews that serviced them, and he was miserable, because the way that company treated safety wore on him daily. So when a heavy civil contractor tracked down his resume and called about a full-time safety manager role on a massive project, he was upfront that he had never done the job. He took it anyway, and he has not looked back. “I’m in safety and I’m gonna be that way for the rest of my career,” he says. “I think it’s my calling.” There is something of the preacher in the way he says it, and in the way he talks about the work generally: fond of a metaphor, quick to a story, dead certain of the stakes. 

Every worker is a customer 

Andrew’s guiding idea is that the people on his site are not a headcount to be managed. They are customers, and his product is safety. He compares it to water. You need it to live, so somebody has to sell it to you whether you feel like buying it that day or not. 

The selling starts in orientation. However many people are in the room, one or twenty-five, he goes around and asks each of them the same things: their name, how many years they have in construction, and what their personal safety culture is, both their own and the one at the company they just came from. The answers tell him almost everything. He describes two men sitting side by side. The first has 20 years in the trade and volunteers that he wears no safety gear at home and came from a company with no safety culture. The second has five years, wears glasses and earplugs to mow his own lawn, and came from a company that was at least trying. To Andrew, the younger man is the safer bet by a mile. The 20-year “good old boy” who has never been hurt is not proof of skill. “That’s called luck,” he says flatly. “I fired a cowboy yesterday, buddy.”

Get them safe when no one is watching 

Once he knows who is in front of him, he meets each person differently. Some respond to policy, so he gives them policy: do this, or you will be written up. Others need something else entirely, and with them he has the harder conversation. “Your wife and your children need you to come home tonight.” 

The point of all that tailoring is one unglamorous truth about a big site: he cannot stand next to everyone. If he leads with the rulebook and nothing else, workers simply perform safety while he is watching. “The second you walk away, their safety culture doesn’t exist.” A one-to-one ratio of safety managers to workers is impossible, so the only version of the job that actually works is getting people to want to be safe when he is nowhere near them. 

Play offense  

A lot of that, he argues, comes down to whether a company is playing offense or defense, and he reaches for football to explain it. Defense is cheap up front and expensive later: buy the least costly gear, push the policy, and pay the bill when someone gets hurt. “Defense, unfortunately, is somebody losing a finger,” he says. A totaled company truck. Someone losing their life. He refuses to play it. 

His clearest example is gloves. Companies buy the cheapest, bulkiest gloves they can find because they cost a fraction of the good ones, then order everyone to wear them. Andrew asks you to picture the reality on his site: 95 degrees, the heat index over 100, a worker sweating through his shirt. “Do you really think that that guy wants to wear those gloves right now?” And does he feel valued? So Andrew started letting his crews tell him which gloves, glasses, and hi-vis pants they actually wanted, and he bought the better gear even when it blew the budget. He sat down with the finance team and asked them to trust him. “Just be patient with me. This is going to pay off.” It did. Incidents dropped, and the company began rolling his approach out beyond his site. He is careful not to cast the office as the villain. Management buys the cheap gloves because “that’s all they know,” he says. They did not come up through the field the way he did, so they have never learned what he knows about the difference between one glove and another. 

Be an elevator 

The metaphor he keeps returning to comes straight out of the part of his career he was gladdest to leave. Every Wednesday at noon he runs a lunch-and-learn, pizza included, capped at 10 to 15 people so it stays intimate, the opposite of the big OSHA-required stand-downs he finds too crowded to change anyone. In a recent one, he told the crew he wanted a “fail-safe safety culture,” and when they looked at him blankly, he reached for elevators. An elevator is built with layer on layer of redundancy, so that “if one thing fails, the other catches it,” and another behind that. Strip those layers away, and the moment one thing goes wrong, the car drops to the bottom of the shaft. “I need every single one of y’all to be elevators,” he told them. The man who once managed thousands of elevators now asks his workers to become them.

He ended that meeting the way he ends most things, on a line built to stick: “Always have a backup plan, never rely on anything to work out the way it was intended to work out. Always be mindful of how can I protect myself in case that goes wrong, because you don’t get a chance to ask afterwards.” 

Boots on the ground 

Asked what he would tell himself starting out, he does not reach for anything about the rulebook. His answer is to get out of the office. Too much of the industry knows safety on paper, he says, and knowing it on paper is not the same as being on the dirt with the people doing the work. “If we’re sitting in an office and our boots are not on the dirt, 90% of the time you are playing defense.” He admits he does not always manage it himself. But the goal never changes, and he sums up his whole approach in two short phrases: be an elevator, and boots on the ground. Build in the backups, and be there in person to make sure they hold.