Making Construction Safety Easier to Follow and Harder to Ignore, with Kathryn Prus
"One of my phrases is make it easy for people to follow the rules. And I understand that if we've got a trade going from one general contractor to another, you want it to be as consistent as possible.” Kathryn Prus, EHS Director at Skanska
OK, everyone, this one hits at the heart of what actually makes safety work at scale. The secret sauce isn’t stricter rules, but making it easier for people to follow them. In this episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sit down with Kathryn Prus, Environmental Health & Safety Director at Skanska, for a grounded and honest conversation about building safety cultures that people want to be part of. We dig into why consistency across trade partners matters more than adding another rule, how authentic leadership creates real psychological safety on job sites, and what it takes to engage crews beyond compliance checklists.
Kathryn shares practical strategies, from standardising expectations across projects to using hands-on, gamified approaches that get workers actively spotting hazards instead of tuning out. We also talk openly about mental health in construction and why making space for those conversations isn’t optional anymore. This episode is about moving safety from paperwork to people, so everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.
"One of my phrases is make it easy for people to follow the rules. And I understand that if we've got a trade going from one general contractor to another, you want it to be as consistent as possible.” Kathryn Prus, EHS Director at Skanska
OK, everyone, this one hits at the heart of what actually makes safety work at scale. The secret sauce isn’t stricter rules, but making it easier for people to follow them. In this episode of
The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sit down with
Kathryn Prus, Environmental Health & Safety Director at
Skanska, for a grounded and honest conversation about building safety cultures that people
want to be part of. We dig into why consistency across trade partners matters more than adding another rule, how authentic leadership creates real psychological safety on job sites, and what it takes to engage crews beyond compliance checklists.
Kathryn shares practical strategies, from standardising expectations across projects to using hands-on, gamified approaches that get workers actively spotting hazards instead of tuning out. We also talk openly about mental health in construction and why making space for those conversations isn’t optional anymore. This episode is about moving safety from paperwork to people, so everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.
Here are some of the topics that Kathryn and I explore:
- How to make consistency your competitive advantage by standardizing safety rules
- Why gamification and hands-on engagement beat lecture-based training
- The psychology of calculated risk in safety leadership
- How to build psychological safety into construction culture
- The trade partner audit approach: review lift plans and certifications
- Why regional collaboration among competing contractors strengthens everyone's safety program
Kathryn Prus is the Environmental Health and Safety Director for Skanska's Oregon operations, overseeing commercial construction projects across schools, airports, hospitals, and complex infrastructure developments. With a career trajectory spanning administrative EHS roles to executive leadership, she has built a reputation for transforming safety culture through authenticity, clear communication, and strategic technology integration, moving well beyond compliance to create sustainable safety excellence. Her approach emphasizes making safety rules easy to follow for trade partners and subcontractors, recognizing that consistency across general contractors directly impacts worker safety and engagement.
Episode Resources: