Moss Construction Builds a Proactive Safety Culture With AlertMedia

Communicating With a Dispersed Workforce When Seconds Count

Founded in 2004, Moss Construction has grown from a small family-owned business into a national, multi-billion dollar construction firm. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Moss has offices and construction sites across Hawaii, California, Texas, and Florida. Moss’ portfolio spans a diverse range of construction projects, including high-rise residential, mixed-use developments, hospitality, education, justice, solar energy, and sports.

Before finding AlertMedia, Moss relied on email to communicate with employees about critical events and severe weather like hurricanes. As the organization grew, however, so did the range of potential threats. To keep employees informed during rapidly evolving events, Moss turned to AlertMedia’s multichannel emergency communication software. With AlertMedia, Moss now can ensure timely, accurate, and reliable emergency communication with its distributed workforce. Before the forecasted landfall of a Category 4 hurricane in Hawaii, for example, AlertMedia helped Moss rapidly identify several employees who were ill-prepared for the storm and usher them to a safe location. By using AlertMedia to deliver clear, effective, and proactive emergency communication, Moss can maintain the trust, safety, and well-being of its people through any critical event.

Evolving Beyond Email-Only Communication To Keep Workers Safe

In the years since Moss Construction was founded as a small, two-employee family business in South Florida, it has rapidly grown into a large, distributed organization with facilities across the U.S. With more than 1,200 employees nationally and approximately 60 active construction projects at any given time, communicating critical information to its growing workforce was a challenge. The company also needed a better way to reach its sizable percentage of employees that work outdoors and are exposed to the elements and other threats.

When an active shooter incident occurred at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport—where Moss happened to have 250 workers on a job site—the company knew email-only communication wasn’t enough.

While Moss was eventually able to reach employees and none were harmed, the event was the catalyst that changed the way Moss approached emergency communication moving forward. “When we had hundreds of workers in close proximity to an active shooter event, we knew we needed something more than email to keep employees safe,” says Scott Gerard, Vice President of Environmental, Health & Safety at Moss Construction. “Emailing people during unexpected and rapidly evolving events doesn’t work. You simply can’t get information to them or from them fast enough.”

After this incident, Moss tried an emergency communication solution from another provider; however, the company soon found the vendor’s solution inflexible and its customer support team less accommodating than they had hoped. After re-evaluating the vendor landscape, Moss found a trusted, reliable partner in AlertMedia.

Accurate, Segmented Employee Data Enables Targeted Notifications

Moss selected AlertMedia for its robust emergency communication capabilities and responsive, easy-to-work-with customer support team. Says Gerard, “Relationships are foundational to how we do business and core to our culture. AlertMedia provides a level of support, attention, and collaborative engagement I have not seen with other vendors. AlertMedia has truly become an extension of our team.”

Every job site is given its own group within AlertMedia. When a new employee starts, he or she is assigned to that group. This enables Moss to quickly communicate about site-specific threats only with employees that may be impacted. When an employee is terminated or moves to another job site, their group assignment is updated. By directly syncing with the organization’s HR directory, AlertMedia also automatically updates users so that contact data is always up to date.

“Manually keeping employee data updated in multiple systems would be incredibly time consuming, especially in the construction industry where the workforce is so dynamic,” says Gerard. “AlertMedia enables targeted, reliable communication while minimizing the administrative workload on our team. By syncing with our HR directory and allowing us to easily build location-specific groups, AlertMedia makes it easy to effectively communicate the right information to the right people.”

Quickly Identifying At-Risk Employees in the Face of a Category 4 Hurricane

One of the most illustrative examples of the value AlertMedia has brought to Moss comes from Hurricane Lane, a Category 4 hurricane that threatened Hawaii in 2018. Moss had several construction job sites and solar projects ongoing across Hawaii at the time, with hundreds of workers spread across the islands. Moss needed to ensure its people were prepared and safe throughout the storm.

Fortunately Hurricane Lane spared the islands from catastrophic damage, but Gerard credits AlertMedia with how quickly Moss was able to mobilize its preparedness plans. “There’s no way we could have kept our people safe from this Category 4 hurricane without AlertMedia. Email would have taken too long and phone circuits were already faltering. With AlertMedia, we were able to account for and ensure all employees were in a safe location prior to the storm,” says Gerard. “AlertMedia would have been the difference between life and death if Hurricane Lane had hit the Hawaiian Islands as forecasted.”