You have to go on to a construction site and address potential short comings in their health and safety culture. This might be due to a transient workforce coming from various different safety cultures or a site manager who has done it their way for twenty years and does not want or like change, how would you over come this, and what other obstacles could you expect to find?

Any help would be appreciated.


Brett

Bmann

I wonder to what extent your questions ' how would you over come this, and what other obstacles could you expect to find?' can be of much use in the situation you describe.

To the extent that you regard your job as 'overcoming' cultural problems and searching for additional 'obstacles', you appear to be setting yourself up for failure rather than the best possible success.

By choosing a handful of useful safety priorities and delivering on them, you increase your chances of gaining momentum and recognition for your own capabilities.

Once you've chosen them, you can also choose to share them with the site manager and invite his/her co-operation and to keep him/her informed about progress, for which you can acknowledge publicly any contribution he/she makes.

And you can choose to write a regular article for the newsletter of any employers' associations of which your firm is a member, including praise for the site's changes in behaviour.

Unfortunately, if you were actually chosen to 'change the culture on site', there are probably rather more appropriate places to ask the question you have than here.

Additionally you need to change the clients culture as until clients change nothing will change as >98% of all clients want cheap and quick jobs and try to put as many barriers between themselves and the site as possible so as if there is a H&S problem they are distant from responsibility and the HSE needs to change as they do not usually [>99% of the time] go after clients and it is getting worse

Unless change is driven from the very top of the organisation you as a safety professional will only be able to take it so far then you will hit the ceiling and that ceiling will be the directors reluctance to change - the we have always done it this way syndrome.
The construction industry is unlike any other industry in many many ways I.e clients not really understanding the build process , cost focused especially now that work is not as plentiful.
Keep chipping away at the block making small steps rather than big strides and eventually you will get people on board either that or a serious incident will occur and the fall out from this will necessitate those changes in culture and attitude.

Could not agree more with the previous replies.

There are however some things that can be done to improve safety in construction, and yes you might say it is culture (depending on your definition).

I was involved in some research looking at this very area and some key things were confirmed regards construction. It is a very dynamic and transient workplace with layers of contracting and often disparate standards, safety being one of them.

What you need to consider is that you cannot really change peoples attitude to safety in that environment, you don't have the time. What you can change is how people behave. So, looking at something like the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen) you can (client willing and leading!) change the drivers of behaviour.

Construction workers move from one site to the next and receive the same inductions, tool box talks, safety posters......blah....blah...on every site. But you need to establish different (safer) norms on a site right from the outset so that when a worker arrives on site the norms you want (safe behaviours) are already established and these will have a strong influence on new workers to conform = work safely. This establishes a "safe culture" on that particular site.

Its not easy and requires buy in from the top, as already stated in previous posts, but it can be done and it can work.

Nice post Bob and very well said.

Especially like your last line as my experience reflects that truth of that. We developed some training and took a long time working with pilot teams to translate the academia into site speak that the project manager and chippy could understand at the same course delivery.

When we got there the results were more than we anticipated with everyone looking out for everyone else. Result!

Some excellent posts here.

I think that many organisations are realising that H/S management is owned by all in the company. The H/S team does not act independantly of design, procurement, site management, senior management etc. However management control does start at the top of an organisation and spreads throughout via directors, senior management and middle management. The workforce recognize this. The question is at what level can safety improvement be most influenced.

A good site manager is worth their weight in gold. Supervisors and foremen will follow suit. However we are all aware that when we attend site the various managers are under enormous pressures to deliver. The safety team are one of many teams putting resource demands on the site.

The problem is that we work in a dangerous industry. We write and review risk assessments to attempt to control. Various factors then combine to ask the site teams to shorten the programme and cut costs along the way.

Culture is very hard to change (and often mis-used as a safety term). Instead its about behaviours and leadership 'style' - I would suggest getting a local supervisor or manager to stick to the local rules or implement them properly requires a simple transactional leadership style. At the site level it appears to be about rules, process and avoiding a deformed link between risk and reward. It sounds like its back-to-basic approach might be helpful.

There is a place for culture change through longer term development of directors 'transformational' leadership style, but a stroppy local manager on site isnt usually the starting point for this work.