Describe why establishing safety often requires taking personal risk that is not
ID: 1710108 • Letter: D
Question
Describe why establishing safety often requires taking personal risk that is notcomfortable and the construction engineer or manager’s role to create a safe work environment and culture. Hint: your response should include, but not be limited to: What sort of personal risk? How does the high levels of personal risk required to improve, change the root cause of accidents from individual unsafe acts to organizational failure to establish safe conditions? What is the construction engineer or manager’s safety role?
Please answer in about 500 words and answer all parts thoroughly!
Explanation / Answer
The construction industry is one of the most injury-prone industries, in which production is usually prioritized over safety in daily on-site communication.
There are four main components that develop a safety culture
1.Good communication goals and follow up actions.
2.Providing effective safety tools which allow employees to be proactive in their daily work.
3.Having effective training initiatives that teach how to use safety tools to their full extent.
4.Supporting safety initiatives with a strong accountability program.
Communication between managers and employees is a large part of creating a safe work environment. Open communication allows for all employees to be made aware of the goals and expectations of safety efforts and is key to a safety programme’s success. However, studies have shown that open communication alone is not sufficient enough to ensure a low injury rate.
SAFETY CULTURE
A positive safety culture is not something that can be purchased or simply acquired; it is something that needs to be developed and grown from within an organisation. It can be witnessed that culturally, the construction industry remains a trade where employees feel that taking risks is part of their job and often times may worry about what their peers think about those who do take extra precautions. Building a safe workplace and a proactive safety culture requires constant attention and development and starts at the top. Transforming the safety culture and mindset of employees in the construction industry is challenging; it takes strong leaders, persistence and a personal and relevant safety programme to accomplish such a task.
INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANISATIONAL ACCIDENTS
There are two kinds of accidents those that happen to individuals and those that happen to organisations.
These accidents reduce by following,
To create understanding and awareness of the local hazards,
To give clear guidance on how to operate safely,
To provide alarams and arnings when danger is imminent,
To restore the system in a safe state in off-normal situation,
To interpose safety barriers between the hazards and the potential losses,
To contain and eliminate the hazards should they escape this barrier,
To provide the means of escape and rescue should hazard containment fail.
Achieving a significant and sustained reduction in accidents will require concerted efforts directed at the hierarchy of causal influences. Important points are:
1.Safety needs to be owned and integrated across the project team, from designers and engineers through to skilled trade personnel and operatives.
2.Other research has shown how the lead given by front line supervisors has a strong influence on safety performance. Worker participation in managing safety is important, to generate ideas and to build ownership and responsibility.
3.Where safety depends on communication and coordination, it is important that a robust safe system of work is established. This should not be left to chance.
4.Significant improvement is required with standards of site layout and housekeeping. Principal contractors are well placed to raise expectations of acceptable practice.
5.Greater attention should be given to the design and selection of tools, equipment and materials. Safety, rather than price, should be the paramount consideration.
6.Greater sophistication is needed with the design and use of PPE. PPE is often uncomfortable and impedes performance. Forcing workers to wear PPE when risks are 29 not present can be counterproductive. PPE should be a last rather than first resort for risk management.
7.There is a need across the industry for a more intelligent engagement with risk management. Emphasis should be on actively identifying and managing risks, starting at the point of their inception, rather than treating risk assessment as merely a paper exercise.
8.Construction should be encouraged to benchmark its safety practices against other industries. The excuse that construction is inherently ‘different’ in some way from other industries does not stand up to scrutiny.
9.Greater opportunity should be taken to learn from failures, with implementation of accident investigation procedures, both by employers and regulatory bodies, structured to reveal contributing factors earlier in the causal chain.
10.It is important for ‘safety’ to be disassociated from ‘bureaucracy’.
11.Frequently, safety does not have to come at a price. Where there are cost implications, regulatory bodies and trade associations need to work to make sure there is a level playing field with respect to tendering.