scholarly journals A Safety Climate Framework for Improving Health and Safety in the Indonesian Construction Industry

Author(s):  
Fatma Lestari ◽  
Riza Yosia Sunindijo ◽  
Martin Loosemore ◽  
Yuni Kusminanti ◽  
Baiduri Widanarko

The Indonesian construction industry is the second largest in Asia and accounts for over 30% of all occupational injuries in the country. Despite the size of the industry, there is a lack of safety research in this context. This research, therefore, aims to assess safety climate and develop a framework to improve safety in the Indonesian construction industry. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 311 construction workers. The results show a moderately healthy safety climate but reflect numerous problems, particularly around perceived conflicts between production and safety logics, cost trade-offs being made against other competing project priorities, poor safety communication, poor working conditions, acceptance of poor safety as the norm, poor reporting and monitoring practices, poor training and a risky and unsupportive working environment which prevents workers from operating safely. Two new safety climate paradoxes are also revealed: contradictions between management communications and management practices; contradictions between worker concern for safety and their low sense of personal accountability and empowerment for acting to reduce these risks. A low locus of control over safety is also identified as a significant problem which is related to prevailing Indonesian cultural norms and poor safety policy implementation and potential conflicts between formal and informal safety norms, practices and procedures. Drawing on these findings, a new integrated framework of safety climate is presented to improve safety performance in the Indonesian construction industry.

Author(s):  
Ibrahim Mosly ◽  
Anas A. Makki

Workers’ wellbeing and safety is important in the construction industry due to the high risk of accidents. Safety climate development is a positive initial step toward raising the safety levels of construction practitioners. This study aims at revealing the factors influencing safety climate perceptions in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia. A set of extracted factors from the literature was validated and used to design a comprehensive questionnaire survey. Data was collected from 401 personnel working on 3 large construction project sites in Saudi Arabia. Descriptive statistics and the crosstabulation algorithm, Kendall’s tau-b correlation test, were used to analyze the data. The study revealed a set of 13 factors influencing safety climate perceptions, which are: Supervision, guidance and inspection, appraisal of risks and hazards, social security and health insurance, workmate influences, management safety justice, management commitment to safety, education and training, communication, workers’ safety commitment, workers’ attitude toward health and safety, workers’ involvement, supportive environment, and competence. The results also indicate the significant and anticipated role of top management in safety climate at sites. Implications of this study include assisting construction industry stakeholders to better understand and enhance safety climate, which in turn will lead to improved safety behavior, culture, motivation, and performance.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vigneshkumar Chellappa ◽  
Vasundhara Srivastava ◽  
Urmi Ravindra Salve

Purpose Construction workers’ health and safety (CWHS) research in India has not gained much attention among researchers. This study aims to review articles related to CWHS research in India using a science mapping approach. Design/methodology/approach A total number of 64 journal articles published between 2004 and 2019 were extracted from the Scopus database using keywords including “construction safety,” “occupational health,” “ergonomics in construction,” etc. VOSviewer software was used to examine the influential keywords, documents, sources and authors in the field of CWHS. Findings The study found that most of the current work focuses on safety management, safety climate, safety performance, musculoskeletal disorders and behavior-based safety. The result indicates no theoretical basis for the theories and learning methods for the existing studies. Practical implications The findings open up a research gap that researchers explore to enhance workers’ health and safety within the Indian construction environment. Originality/value The paper is the first article to provide a better understanding of current research in the field of CWHS in India by analyzing its growth through the science mapping approach.


Author(s):  
Wen Yi ◽  
Albert P. C. Chan

Climate change is experienced in many countries located in tropical/ subtropical regions with generally hot/humid condition. Heat illness, particularly heat stroke, has caused a substantial increase in morbidity and mortality during heat waves. Thus, the high incidence of heat stroke is a pressing concern in the construction industry. Construction workers, being exposed to such unpleasant working environment, are at a higher risk of heat stress while undertaking physically demanding tasks. This paper aims to establish a model for predicting fatigue of construction workers in hot weather. During the period of summer months in 2010 and 2011, we conducted 39 field measurements on six construction sites in Hong Kong and collected a series of meteorological, personal, and work-related parameters. A total of 550 synchronized datasets were measured to establish the model. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), a type of artificial intelligence technology which implements more complex data-analysis features into existing applications, was applied to forecast the fatigue of construction workers. Performance measures including mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), R2, and root-mean-square deviation (RMSE) confirm that the established model is a good fitting with high accuracy. The ANN-based model presents a reliable and scientific forecast physical condition of workers which may enhance the occupational health and safety (OHS) in the construction industry.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Смирнова ◽  
Marina Smirnova ◽  
Кохова ◽  
Irina Kokhova

Labour protection is one of the areas in the sphere of enterprise activity. Development of audit activity in the protection of labor will give the development of the system of external and internal audit, as an alternative to the system of state control. The article deals with the modern understanding of the conditions and safety. The definitions of “Working Environment”, “Working Conditions”, “Occupational Safety and Health.” It reveals the importance of health and safety for today’s workers. The author analyzes the current situation in the Russian Federation in the field of health and safety based on the data of Rosstat. We investigate occupational diseases, injuries, accidents at work. We investigate promising areas of assessment of working conditions on the basis of modern organization of audit of indicators such as the causes and conditions of occupational injuries for the previous period, especially the use of advanced technology and safe technology; ergonomic devices that protect the rights, etc.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 738-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Tanvi Newaz ◽  
Peter Rex Davis ◽  
Marcus Jefferies ◽  
Manikam Pillay

Purpose Safety climate and its impact on safety performance is well established; however, researchers in this field suggest that the absence of a common assessment framework is a reflection of the state of development of this concept. The purpose of this paper is to propose a five-factor model that can be used to diagnose and measure safety climate in construction safety research and practice. Design/methodology/approach A systematic review was adopted, and following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, 574 articles were selected at the start of the study based on a developed review protocol for investigating safety climate factors. While examining the factor analysis of different studies, data reliability and data validity of the individual research findings were considered and frequency of factors uploaded was used to determine the significance as a quantitative measure to develop the ranking of safety climate factors. Findings The review identified that, from the established measures of safety climate in construction, there is little uniformity on factor importance. However, management commitment safety system role of the supervisor; workers’ involvement and group safety climate were found to be the most common across the studies reviewed. It is proposed these factors are used to inform a five-factor model for investigating safety climate in the construction industry. Originality/value The findings of this study will motivate researchers and practitioners in safety to use the five-factor safety climate model presented in this paper and test it to develop a common factor structure for the construction industry. The fact that the model is comprised of five factors makes it easier to be used and implemented by small-to medium-sized construction companies, therefore enhancing its potential use.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Abdullah Alshehri

Background: Every building project needs a plan for it to optimize value and minimize cost for better profitability. Currently, in the construction industry around the world, not all stakeholders are aware of value management and its benefits. Aim: This review aims to explore the awareness level of value management among all players in the construction industries. Also, to raise dust on the significance of applying value management within the construction workplace. Objective: The objective was explored using research and review papers from 30 studies for 18-years (2000-2018). Methods: Value management is essential at the briefing stage, specifically in the contractor's health and safety performance, the design process, cost and quality, contract strategy, and performance of time. Results: Results indicated that the level of awareness and implementation of value management varies from region to region and country to country. Some implementation barriers include lack of knowledge and awareness, no standard method of problem-solving, lack of value management practices by contractors, the concept is new in many regions, contractors not willing to implement VM fully during projects, and lack of qualified personnel to adopt VM. From this review, some of the benefits of adopting VM include maximizing productivity, better sustainability, and expected targets achieved within a reasonable time. Conclusion: In conclusion, the construction industry needs to put forth efforts to maximize the awareness and applications of value management to enhance project outcomes. The study is valuable for all the value management professionals involved with construction, in general, to try and incorporate it into their work ethics for better productivity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Kamoli Adetunji ◽  
Razali Adul Hamid ◽  
Syamsul Hendra Bin Mahmud

Information concerning occupational accidents are far less accessible in developing nations, and where data do present, they are mostly undependable. The serious problem is under-reporting. Various types of occupational injuries information are sometimes not reported to the appropriate authorities by the construction organizations. Also, the regulatory authorities with the statutory obligation to ensure all occupational accidents are reported, perform below standard. The aim of the study therefore is to explore the method of improving the reporting of occupational accidents in the Nigerian construction industry. Literature review of under-reporting of occupational accidents was conducted, thereafter, a field survey with 300 structured questionnaires were distributed, to solicit information from the construction professionals in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja Nigeria. 235 questionnaires were returned, therefore considered for the analysis of the study. The relative importance index was used in the analysis of the data with SPSS software. The study found that an increase in health and safety awareness will enhance employees and organizations in the recording and reporting of occupational accidents. The study suggests that organizations and employees should keep with internal accidents recording systems whether or not legal obligations to report them are in place, the reasons being for humanitarian, economic, management and industrial relations.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0243056
Author(s):  
Marta Stasiła-Sieradzka ◽  
Agata Chudzicka-Czupała ◽  
Marta Znajmiecka-Sikora

Implementation of effective programs to improve occupational safety should be linked to an understanding of the specific nature of the given job. The aim of the research was to compare occupational groups with different job-related specificities: industrial production line workers, retail workers and mine rescuers, in terms of their assessment of the work safety climate. The survey covered 2,995 respondents with diversified demographic characteristics. The study used an abridged version of the Safety Climate Questionnaire by Znajmiecka-Sikora (2019) to assess 10 separate safety climate dimensions. The results of the MANOVA multivariate analysis, Wilks’ multivariate F-tests and univariate F tests prove that there is a statistically significant difference between the respondents representing the three occupational groups collectively in terms of global assessment of all work safety climate dimensions, and also indicate significant differences between workers belonging to the three occupational groups in terms of their assessment of the individual dimensions of the work safety climate, except the organization’s occupational health and safety management policy as well as technical facilities and ergonomics, which may be due to the universality of the requirements set for organizations with regard to these two aspects of safe behavior. The differences observed in the assessment of the remaining work safety climate dimensions induces one to promote more differentiated and individualized activities, taking into account the work specificity and the nature of the threats occurring in the respective working environment of the representatives of the different occupations. The difference in assessment of the work safety climate found in the research encourages one to create practical programs for safety, not only in the procedural and technical dimension, but also in the social and psychological one.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 10398
Author(s):  
Daniel W. M. Chan ◽  
Matteo Cristofaro ◽  
Hala Nassereddine ◽  
Nicole S. N. Yiu ◽  
Hadi Sarvari

What are the different perceptions on safety climate (SC) by workers and managers/supervisors engaged in the construction industry of developing countries? Reconciling these two differing views is pivotal for mitigating and avoiding both the injured and fatal accidents in the construction industry, especially in those developing countries where safety conditions are poor and unpredictable, and safety measures are inadequate in most cases. To answer this research question, the collective perceptions of 118 construction workers and 123 managers/supervisors on the SC in construction projects in Iran were gleaned and investigated. In particular, these perceptions were initially collected by two different empirical surveys validated by a sample of university professors and construction managers and then analyzed through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett’s test of sphericity under factor analysis, together with a one-sample t-test. Results indicated that “workers’ attitudes and perceptions”, “safety knowledge and training”, “working relationships and roles of colleagues”, and “workers’ risk perceptions” are important categories of SC factors perceived by construction workers, whereas “safety rules and management practices” is the essential category of SC factors discerned by managers/supervisors. The difference in perceptions between workers and managers/supervisors is considered to be beneficial for an overall understanding of SC in general and for developing countries in particular. Moreover, a series of effective suggestions for improving SC in the construction industry of developing countries are provided with reference to each category. The views of SC factors are reinforced as a social process combining the synergies of workers and managers/supervisors, as well as proper safety training to be pushed forward as an essential activity that should be incorporated in human resources development of construction organizations so as to improve the existing level of SC, leading to fewer accidents at the industry level.


Author(s):  
Christophe Martin ◽  
Melchior Pelleterat de Borde ◽  
Franck Guarnieri ◽  
Felicity Lamm

This paper reports on the findings from stage one of a collaborative New Zealand and French research project on the construction industry and in particular the link between occupational health and safety (OHS), subcontracting and cultural diversity. The construction sector in France, New Zealand and elsewhere has not only one of the highest injury, illness and fatality rates but the sector also has a prevalence of small subcontracting firms and a substantial migrant labour force (CNAM, 2008; Department of Labour, 2009). The practice of outsourcing in this industry has created a complex web of sub­contracting with an international dimension and resultant confusion over regulatory responsibilities for the health and safety of workers. Thus, those in the industry are grappling with challenges of managing a culturally diverse workforce within a hazardous working environment. Hiring poorly paid migrant labours in the construction industry, however, is not a recent phenomenon in either France or New Zealand. This in turn has created a melting pot where diversity can be both an advantage and a weaknesses in terms of safety. One the on hand the enormous variability of demographic and social status (Jounin, 2009) and cultures (a term which here encompass personal, collective and professional elements) can lead to dissonance on construction site and yet on the other hand diversity can stimulate innovative ways of implementing safety measures more effectively (Mearns and Yule, 2009). Given that the international subcontracting process and migrant labour are central to the construction industry, the aim of this qualitative research is to identify and explain the sources of OHS failure and suggest adjustments that need to be made.


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