What Could Kill You Today? Clark Builders’ Chris Vienneau on Finding the Hazards That Matter Most
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Ask a crew how they could get hurt today and you will usually get a long list. Ask what on site could kill them and the room tends to go quiet. In Chris Vienneau’s experience, the hazard nobody names is often the one that turns up in the investigation.
In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Chris Vienneau, Director of Health, Safety and Environment at Clark Builders, to dig into critical controls, how to keep a strong program from going stale, and why the people doing the work have to be treated as the experts.
Chris came to safety by accident. He grew up in Ottawa and earned a psychology degree at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, where he played football, then moved west to Calgary with his wife and their two dogs. He picked up whatever work he could find, from roofing and demolition to building furniture and delivering bouncy castles to kids’ birthday parties.
One bouncy castle went to the home of Clark Builders’ Calgary health and safety manager. A conversation turned into a job offer: running equipment, doing general labor and handling safety on a project, as long as Chris could finish the firefighter training he had already started. He turned out to be good at it, and moved from running safety on a single job to 14 projects at once, then to Calgary lead, regional manager and director.
Inside this episode:
Chris explains critical controls with a climbing analogy. Procedures are written by someone flying past the mountain, and the crew plans the day standing at the bottom of it, so something unplanned will always come up on the way. “You can’t foolproof mountain climbing,” he says. The answer is to set minimum anchors so a fall is never a fatal one. On high-risk work at Clark, those controls have to be verified by the worker and their supervisor together, and the job does not start without them. “It’s possible that you may suffer an injury, but you will not suffer catastrophe.”He also pushes back on the idea that a program that is getting better can afford to relax. When people point out how much has improved compared with five years ago, Chris brings them back to the goal of an environment where nobody gets hurt. Too much change too fast wears people out, he says, but “safety doesn’t work if it’s not relentless.” Part of keeping that energy up is recognition. Clark runs draws, shares milestones across the business and gives shout-outs at town halls, so that safety conversations are not only about what went wrong.
You will also hear why Chris believes blame never fixes anything, how he coaches safety professionals to help workers reach their own solutions rather than handing them the fix, and how AI and robotics are starting to change risk monitoring on jobsites. He finishes with the lesson he wishes he had learned in his first year as a safety manager: a system people will actually use has to be simple, quick, easy to understand and obviously worth it.
If you run a safety program, are stepping from the field into leadership, or have ever wondered why the most dangerous hazard on site is the one nobody mentions, this one is worth the listen.
Chris is on LinkedIn, and you can read more about how Clark Builders approaches safety on their website.
