Safety at work: Changing the culture

Ken Moncur, safety, health, environment and quality manager with leading construction firm Mansell, takes a look at the issue of behavioural safety in the construction industry

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WE ALL want to be healthy. We all want to be safe at work. So why is it that, despite all this, we still continue to take risks in the workplace?

It’s an interesting question. And it’s one which an increasing number of companies – operating across a range of business sectors – have been considering in great depth recently.

Many of us operating within the construction industry will, at some stage in our career, have encountered the scenario where an operative is experienced and well trained, is using the correct equipment for the task in hand and has been fully briefed on what he or she is to do – and yet something still goes wrong.

The result is often an accident, with someone getting injured, and the cause is nearly always human behaviour.

It is commonly accepted that human behaviour is a contributory factor in a significant number of accidents and near misses in the construction industry. Estimates vary, but about 80-90% of incidents are said to involve human behaviour.

However, there is a growing belief – not only in the construction industry, but throughout the business world in general – that unsafe human behaviour can be strongly and positively influenced by the safety culture of an organisation.

In recent years, many companies have taken steps to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of their employees, and how this behaviour is influenced by the safety culture within an organisation, in order to develop a behavioural safety programme that will benefit all – the employees, the company and its clients.

Mansell is one of the few organisations in the UK construction industry that has taken this approach and believes this will result in long-term, large-scale safety benefits for the company, as well as potentially having a positive spin-off for the construction industry as a whole.

The first step in deciding what type of behavioural safety intervention is most suitable for a company is to understand its existing safety culture.

Mansell recruited the Keil Centre Limited, a firm of chartered psychologists specialising in health and safety, to conduct an assessment of the maturity of the current safety culture within the organisation to determine the most appropriate course of action.

Although it was identified that Mansell had a relatively mature safety culture, some opportunities for improvement were suggested as there were some differences between occupational groups and geographical regions, indicating that a “one size fits all” behavioural safety programme would not be effective.

Interestingly, many of the issues identified pertained not just to Mansell, but to the current situation within the construction industry as a whole, and particularly the perception of risk among workers in the industry.

Based on the results of the assessment, Mansell has now developed an action plan for addressing behavioural safety within the organisation.

As would be the case with any company, the involvement of employees at an early stage in developing improvement actions is key to achieving a good safety culture and helps improve buy-in to these actions as they are implemented.

Some of the measures developed are designed to address issues which are prevalent within the construction industry as a whole, such as lack of intervention in unsafe acts and understanding the motivation behind deliberate unsafe acts.

In order to progress the behavioural safety programme within Mansell, booklets detailing the standards expected from everyone involved in the organisation’s projects have been produced and distributed to all employees and to principal sub-contractors and design teams.

This booklet identifies the core behavioural standards and attitudes on which good health and safety performance depends and which, it is hoped, will be embedded into the Mansell culture.

The organisation has also recently recruited a behavioural change manager who will be responsible for the implementation of the next phase of this challenging programme.

Changing the culture of a company, far less that of an entire industry, is not a short-term programme and it is anticipated that behavioural safety changes within Mansell – and, hopefully, the construction industry in general – will be evident in the next three to five years.

For further information, call 01224 717700, or visit www.mansell.plc.uk