What is a Field Level Risk Assessment (FLRA)?
Who fills one out, and when
The worker doing the task fills out the FLRA, usually right before the task starts. It is not something a supervisor fills out in advance on someone else's behalf, because the whole point is to capture what is actually in front of the person doing the work: the weather that day, the equipment nearby, what changed since yesterday. On a longer shift, a worker can complete a fresh FLRA any time conditions change, not only at clock-in.
An FLRA is standard practice on Canadian construction sites, alongside toolbox talks and equipment circle checks. It exists because a generic safety orientation from months ago cannot know what a specific work front looks like on a specific morning.
What a good FLRA contains
A good FLRA is specific to the task, not a generic checklist ticked through on autopilot. It records the basics first: date, time, location, weather, and who is supervising. Then it covers the hazards actually visible at the work front, grouped into categories like mechanical, electrical, gravity, chemical, thermal, and environmental, with a short note on what could go wrong in each category that applies.
For each hazard identified, the worker names the task it applies to, rates how likely it is and how bad it would be if it happened, and writes down the control plan: what will actually be done to reduce it. It also captures the PPE required for the task, the emergency equipment on hand, any permits or life-saving rules in play (things like work at heights, energy isolation, or confined space), and a closeout once the work is done: was equipment removed, was the job left in acceptable condition, and who signed off.
How the risk score works
Each hazard on an FLRA gets two ratings: likelihood, from rare to likely, and severity, from minor to fatal. The risk level is not a guess or a single subjective label. It is calculated by scoring likelihood from 1 to 4 and severity from 1 to 4, then multiplying the two. A score of 1 to 3 is low risk, 4 to 8 is medium, and 9 to 16 is high.
That multiplication is what separates a real risk assessment from a signature box that gets ticked through. A hazard that is unlikely but fatal if it happens, like an energy isolation failure, still lands in medium or high risk, because severity carries real weight in the math. Only the genuinely small combinations stay low: a likely but minor hazard still scores 4, which is the bottom of medium, on the reasoning that something expected to happen deserves a control even when the consequence is small. The score comes from the two answers the worker actually gave, not from how quickly the form gets filled out, so a high-risk job reads as high risk instead of disappearing into a stack of paperwork.
How SiteLog handles it
In SiteLog, the FLRA is attached to the worker's time entry and site, so it is timestamped and attributed to the person who filled it out and the day it was filled out. A worker can start one at clock-in or any time during the shift, not only at the start of the day, and each hazard row gets its risk level calculated automatically as soon as likelihood and severity are entered, rather than left for someone to work out later. Forepersons can see who has and has not completed an FLRA for the day and nudge anyone missing one.
The record lives in the app alongside the circle check for equipment and the rest of the day's task and time records, so it exists on the day you need to produce it, not reconstructed from memory weeks later. See how SiteLog works for the rest of the day-to-day flow.