Site Safety Culture

Rather than discussing the implementation of various regulations or seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of safety management systems against templates of best practice, it considers how people think about safety, what it means to them and how they go on to collectively use those ideas in their everyday work. This could also be deemed an evaluation of construction site safety culture, a notoriously problematic term and one that is discussed in more... 

The idea that first inspired this project was very simple -1 was going to find out why people still had accidents on large construction sites, despite there being lots of management efforts made to prevent this, and I was going to sort this out by working out how to develop a positive construction site safety culture. 

Different metrics may be used to describe past performance, predict future performance, and encourage behavioral change. They are a means to evaluate the overall system performance and to develop a path toward superior process safety performance. This is accomplished by identifying where the current performance falls within a spectrum of excellent-to-poor performance. Such information will allow executives and site management to develop plans to address the specific improvement opportunities that could lead to measurable improvement in process safety. Good process safety metrics reinforce a process safety culture that promotes the belief that process safety incidents are preventable, that improvement is continuous, and that policies and procedures are necessary and will be followed. Continuous improvement is necessary and any improvement program will be based on measurable elements. Therefore, to continuously improve performance, organizations must develop and implement effective process safety metrics. 

Cipolla, D., Sheahan, V.L, Biggs, H. and Dingsdag, D. (2006) Using Safety Culture to Overcome Market Force Influence on Construction Site... 

This may be in part reflective of the safety culture programme language of Brand Zero (the engagement approach as explored in Chapter 7), but it also moves away from the numbers, and instead moves back to safety and how safety works on sites, far more har-monistic with the workforces own ways of understanding. 

So is this more flexible and experiential version of safety culture useful and helpful for those trying to manage safety on sites ... 

It is perhaps reassuring to boldly state and accept that safety culture can t be measured, and more fundamentally neither can safety itself. This relieves us of the need to develop ever more complex measures of safety, more convoluted forms and inspection sheets, more detailed policies and procedures, and the bureaucracy that often sits alongside such paper-based approaches that reflect normative concepts of safety culture that don t really work in practice. Instead, this version of safety culture enables us to better prioritise the individual and social aspects that are inherently involved. How people understand safety is important how it is developed, associated and shared by those interacting in the work environment, what they consider significant in their actions and interactions. But we must remain mindful of the fact that this is not something that can be measured either. It is people that contribute and ultimately create the changeable and complicated version of safety culture in practice found on our construction sites. 

However, this did not manage to stop people acting unsafely. Every day I saw that people did not follow the rules, despite inductions and training they still acted unsafely, they still took risks and they still did not always behave with care and concern for everyone else on the site. I sat in training rooms with them on safety culture training programmes, which took a different approach to safety, and I heard the comments afterwards, not to mention the comments before, that they were to lose half a day s pay for this shite. ... 

During on-site safety inspection, supervisors usually find various issues. If a company carries out a result-oriented management, issue means failure and punishment. The way of thinking issues makes employee have a negative attitude, which is adverse to solve problems fundamentally. As we known. Kaizen roots in oriental culture with Humanism. So, Kaizen weakens the contradiction of problems, and make people concentrate on process of solving problems rather than on dealing with confliction of interpersonal relationship. In brief, Kaizen could enhance the efficiency and quality on problems solving. 

Contract workers, particularly those who are present on the site for only a short time, will not be familiar with the facility s overall safety culture, nor with its internal organization. 

Unfortunately, fires, explosions, chemical leaks, and other incidents happen in the process industries. Depending upon the type of plant, its size, work force training, experience, and safety culture, a plant site may experience one or two incidents a year. An incident does not necessarily mean a serious fire or explosion. The most common types of incidents ranked by frequency are ... 

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