"How many of this room have either been on a project with a fatality or been directly involved in a fatality investigation?”
About 40% of the room raised their hand.
That's how one safety manager opened a conversation at the HammerTech Community Event in Chicago this September.
He wasn't looking for sympathy, he was frustrated. These things can have a huge impact on everyone’s life and we as an industry want to do better.
The room nodded. Everyone agreed.
You're fighting the same battles on your jobsites, fall protection failures, inconsistent hazard reporting, subcontractors who skip critical steps. Yet somehow, the lessons learned from one project rarely make it to the crew at another jobsite.
The industry keeps reinventing the same solutions, making the same mistakes, and losing the same lives.
In 2023, more than 1,000 construction workers lost their lives on the job, nearly 20% of all workplace fatalities nationwide. Behind each statistic is a name, a family, and a crew that will never be the same. And behind many of those deaths is a lesson someone, somewhere, had already learned.
What if you actually shared what you knew? What if your toughest safety challenges became someone else's head start?
That question drove the conversations in Chicago. Dozens of general contractors, safety professionals, and field leaders spent the day doing something rare in this industry: admitting what wasn't working.
One conversation stood out: a safety manager from a large general contractor described how his team had been struggling to get onsite teams to fill out observations in their old in-house built system.
“I lost a lot of sleep, over those years, because that in-house tool broke all the time. We knew it was ours and we owned it and it just wasn't very efficient so we weren’t capturing nearly as many observations as we should have.”
Without documenting these observations, follow-up conversations weren’t happening. Lessons weren’t being learned, and onsite teams weren’t making the adjustments needed to make things safer.
“Now that we switched to HammerTech, it’s really easy to do observations. Our numbers have skyrocketed.”
No sales pitch. No proprietary secret. Just one team helping another solve a problem they'd already cracked.
That's what made the day different. There was no "us" and "them"—just peers solving problems together. From strategies for managing high-risk work permits to creative ways to get crews to report near-misses without fear, the conversations were specific, tactical, and refreshingly honest.
The energy in the room (and later on the river cruise) proved something important: you want to help each other. You just don't always have a space to do it. culture?
Here's what your safety software should do: make it easier for you to do the right thing. That's it.
Too often, technology becomes the barrier. Clunky interfaces. Systems that don't talk to each other. Platforms that require three clicks and a login just to report a hazard. If your safety tool makes your job harder, you'll find a workaround—or just skip it entirely.
Your foreman doesn't have time to fight with software when there's a concrete pour starting in five minutes, spotty cell service, and gloves that don't work on touchscreens. In that moment, "innovative features" don't matter. Fast does. Simple does.
That's why events like Chicago matter.
They're not just about swapping war stories, they're about identifying what actually works in the field. Every complaint about a clunky workflow, every workaround someone invented because a button was in the wrong place, every "I wish it could just..." comment makes things better for the next person facing that same problem.
One size doesn't fit all. But when you share your adaptations and process improvements with other contractors, everyone gets better faster. When you're honest about what's not working, technology providers can actually fix it instead of guessing.
That's partnership. Not "here's a product, good luck." But "let's figure this out together."
He proved that data can help organisations move from reactive to proactive improvements by highlighting what truly matters: engagement, accountability, and trust.
What makes the construction community unique is your willingness to help one another, even across company lines. Every time you share how you solved a problem, another team avoids a potential incident. Every time you open up about what didn't work, someone else learns a better way.
Think about the impact:
Your near-miss report could prevent someone else's fatality
Your toolbox talk innovation could get a disengaged crew to actually participate
Your permitting workflow could save another safety manager 10 hours a week
Your honest feedback on what's broken could fix the tools others struggle with
That spirit of shared learning, of genuine partnership, is what will drive the next wave of safety innovation. Far from finding the perfect technology or the single silver-bullet solution, it's about creating spaces where you can learn from each other's successes and failures without judgment.
That's something worth building on—not just at an event, but every day on every jobsite.
The Chicago event was just one snapshot of what's possible when safety professionals stop guarding information and start collaborating.
But community doesn't have to happen once a year at a formal gathering.
It can happen every time you:
Share a near-miss report with a peer at another company
Ask a fellow contractor how they solved a problem you're facing
Admit what's not working so someone else doesn't waste six months on the same dead end
Give honest feedback to your technology providers about what needs to change
The construction industry has always been built on people who show up, solve problems, and look out for each other. That same spirit—applied to safety—is how you'll finally move the needle on those 1,000+ annual fatalities.
Technology will keep evolving. Systems will get smarter.
But the real breakthroughs will come from you, and the partnerships you build along the way.
Want to be part of the next conversation?
More HammerTech Community events are being planned for 2025. Whether you're interested in hosting a regional gathering, attending as a guest, or connecting with other safety leaders tackling similar challenges, there's room at the table.
Because safety isn't built alone. It's built together. And it starts with you being willing to share what you know.