Welcome to our Meet the Expert series. Today, we are joined by Theophile Louis JOSEPH, Group QHSE Manager at Archetype Group, with over two years of experience driving quality, health, safety, and environmental performance across a wide range of international projects.
With a master’s degree in engineering and durable architecture, and a background as a Construction Manager, Theophile brings a unique combination of technical knowledge and hands-on site experience. His role is essential in ensuring that our teams deliver safe, compliant, and high-quality outcomes at every stage of the project lifecycle.
To begin, we asked Theophile to break down the fundamentals of QHSE and why it matters so much in our industry.
What does QHSE stand for, and why is it critical in our industry?
QHSE stands for Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment. It plays a critical role in our industry and impacts on every level of our work. A strong QHSE system ensures we have the right internal processes to meet and exceed client expectations. It helps prevent delays caused by errors or miscommunication, improves efficiency by promoting safe and effective working conditions, and minimizes risks both in the office and more importantly on site. Additionally, it ensures that we remain fully compliant with local laws and regulations.
In your experience, what are the most common quality challenges faced on construction sites, and how do you proactively address them?
Every construction site presents its own set of challenges, and with them, unique quality issues. The key is to identify these issues as early as possible and implement appropriate corrective actions. Achieving this requires a clear quality plan on site and effective communication among all team members.
If a problem is observed but not reported or is forgotten, it will likely remain unresolved. This is why we are progressively deploying the Polaris tool across more sites. It enables us to track defects and ensure they are addressed in a timely and efficient manner.
What key safety indicators do you monitor regularly across project sites?
On construction sites, we track a range of safety indicators such as hours worked, number of safety interventions, incidents, and rule violations.
These fall into two main types: lagging indicators, which show what has already happened on site such as the number of accidents, and leading indicators, which show what is being done to improve safety such as how many safety drills have been carried out. Both are important to have an overview of the site situation.
Can you walk us through how you respond to a safety incident—from investigation to corrective action?
The first step must always be to provide first aid to the injured worker. This can be done onsite by trained personnel or by calling emergency services, depending on the situation.
At the same time, all work in the affected area must stop until we are sure the site is safe and the cause of the accident is identified and corrected.
Once the area is secure and the emergency response is complete, the safety officer must begin the investigation and issue a safety report. This includes gathering information from all stakeholders and working together to identify the root cause of the accident, not just what happened but why it happened.
After the root cause is confirmed, the company responsible must submit a corrective action plan. This plan must be reviewed and approved by all parties involved. Corrective actions must then be followed up until they are fully implemented.
Finally, the incident must be recorded in the site’s safety log and included in overall reporting for tracking and lessons learned. This helps prevent similar incidents in the future and supports continuous improvement.
Q: What environmental risks do you find most critical to address during project planning?
This largely depends on the project’s impact and its location. One of the key risks during the planning phase is time loss. A design that does not fully account for environmental requirements can lead to significant delays in the permitting process. Underestimating these requirements often results in design modifications, which can affect both the schedule and the overall budget. To address this, we are training more team members in LEED and EDGE certification. This helps us build a stronger understanding of the environmental impact of our projects and allows us to respond more proactively to environmental challenges from the outset.
Thanks to Theophile’s proactive approach to QHSE, several of our international projects have successfully surpassed 1,000,000 safe work hours without a lost-time incident (LTI), a testament to the safety culture we cultivate across Archetype Group.
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