Making site safety addressable and measurable

Replacing manual paper reporting with a mobile app that lets anyone on site flag a hazard or a good practice, in seconds.

As a construction company, health and safety sits at the centre of how Wates operates. The way safety was being recorded, though, didn’t quite match how seriously the business took it. Site managers were filling in paper reports at the end of each reporting period: a process that was slow, error-prone and left the Health and Safety team several steps behind whatever was happening on site.

Wates wanted a different way of working. Reporting needed to be quick enough that anyone could do it. It also needed to be available on every site and to feed a central dashboard so trends could be spotted and acted on in real time.

We designed a mobile app that uses location to detect which site the user is on, removing one of the fiddliest steps of any safety report. From there, anyone can flag something good or something that needs attention, attaching photos and supporting notes as evidence.

We kept the interface deliberately simple. Construction sites are busy, noisy and multilingual; the app had to work for people with English as a second language and for people in a hurry. Intuitive icons, short labels and a clear path through made the difference between a report being filed and a report being skipped.

Reports flow straight to the H&S team via a central dashboard, where individual incidents and wider trends can be reviewed and addressed.