It’s good to talk

This summer, training provider RRC convened a round-table of health and safety leaders from the construction industry for a full and frank discussion of the issues facing the sector today. Here, Gary Fallaize, who chaired the event, provides a summary of their concerns and conclusions.

Construction is one of the biggest employment sectors in the UK, and is consistently the most dangerous, in terms of the number of its workers who are killed and injured every year. The industry’s vast army of employees ranges from migrants with little English and apprentices with little experience, to the skilled and unskilled majority who come together for the duration of a project. Accidents arising from the diversity in languages, standards, and expectations are frequent, and pose a considerable challenge for advocates of behavioural safety and cultural change.

When a group of senior managers and directors (see panel overleaf) met recently for a round-table discussion about health and safety in the construction industry they quickly discovered that they shared many concerns. On the table were legislation, migrant-worker training, and the construction industry’s stubbornly high accident rates. The talks ranged across the threat of custodial sentences for senior managers, the impact of alcohol and drugs testing, and the need for greater grass-roots support from the HSE.

Issues hotly debated included whether high accident rates are inevitable in an ‘inherently’ dangerous industry like construction; should custodial sentences be handed down more frequently in cases where non-compliance results in catastrophe; and is the carrot mightier than the stick in persuading workers to follow the rules? While health and safety will always pose difficult questions like these, the real challenge lies in coming up with the answers, in reaching a consensus, or even in acknowledging that sometimes there are no definitive answers.

While often lively, the conversation revealed a broad agreement in the belief that health and safety, and the responsibilities it imposes, have evolved greatly in recent years. The discipline has progressed from one of pure regulatory compliance into a new age of shared responsibility, risk assessments and method statements. The days when workers could regard health and safety as a management responsibility are drawing to a close, and managers, too, can no longer regard it as a simple matter of regulatory compliance.

Today, it is possible – even necessary – for everyone to take responsibility for their own safety and that of the people working alongside them. Worker empowerment is more to do with individual responsibility than union strength, and behavioural safety and safety culture are increasingly familiar concepts to an industry now concerned with encouraging awareness and motivating safe behaviour rather than ticking boxes and following rules.

Site insight

Getting construction workers to feel they have responsibility for their own safety and that of their colleagues is one goal of the Duffy Group, a £70-million organisation that supplies materials, plant and labour hire. “The safety culture will not improve if workers are just doing what they are told,” said Group safety manager, Stephen McCarthy. “You have to put them in control to a certain extent, and empower them to be able to say ‘I am not doing it this way’, and give them the back-up to feel comfortable saying that.”

McCarthy believes that attitudes towards regulation must change from being unnecessary restrictions imposed from above to codes of practice for the good of all. Such a shift would create positive peer pressure, in that nobody would want to work with those who do not adhere to regulations, knowing it would put their own safety and that of fellow workers in jeopardy.

David Faulds, of P C Harrington Contractors, agreed. His company has been delivering a cultural behavioural programme to reduce accidents by finding out how workers perceive their responsibilities for safety, and challenging these perceptions.

He explained: “There was a general belief that what mattered above all else was just getting the job done, bringing it in on time. Safety was mentioned but only as an after-thought. The belief that we started to drive home was that we could have safety as paramount and still bring the job in on time and on budget. In fact, you could get better production if you work hand in hand with safety.”

But not everyone starts with the workers. Warings Construction has focused on changing attitudes from the top down, encouraging senior management to develop business objectives around safety and reorienting the organisation. “Changing the mindset of the guys that are doing the work is all very well, but it is the management who set the tone of the business,” said head of HSQE, Brian Ormiston.

“As a company with a huge workforce, but a small direct workforce, it is difficult for us to focus directly on the indirect transient construction workers of our supply chain…we empower the competent trade supervisors to plan and organise their tasks on-site using no more than one sheet, and using our Task Safety Plan tool, and then taking part in joint active behavioural monitoring to check the plan is working. In the early days, it posed a number of issues and there was some resistance, but feedback now is that people will not work without it.”

Behavioural change and training go hand in hand, and the consensus was that at senior management and supervisory levels, training must cover much more than just learning about regulations and ticking boxes. Making regulation the main focus makes health and safety sound restrictive; it is better to teach managers how to make workers see it as something that is really going to improve working conditions.

Accountants spend twice as long in training as health and safety professionals, and are taught management skills. Health and safety professionals are not, and their courses do not cover topics like ‘talking to the guys’ and understanding what drives their behaviour. Other professions all require people to have management skills as well as technical knowledge.

Ken Dodd, Group health and safety manager for Manchester Airports Group, agreed with this, saying: “Construction site supervisors have done all the courses, but no one has taught them to really assess the work risks, how to put a man to work safely, and how to convey safety information to operatives. It sounds simple, but it is one of the most vital ingredients to learn.”

And if management fails to learn the lesson, who pays the price? The Health and Safety (Offences) Act, which comes into force in January, will make prison an option for more health and safety offences, and increase the maximum fine that can be imposed by the lower courts to £20,000. Consensus among the group was, however, that penalties are still not stiff enough to deter breaches of health and safety law, and fines will make little difference to the construction industry. “£20k as a cost to a project valued at £100 million is pocket change,” was one response.

But increasing penalties is a step in the right direction, according to Terry Casbolt, safety director with John Doyle Construction. He said: “There was little risk of being placed behind bars before, and now the threat of that will certainly make people think harder about health and safety.” However, he added that “the changes could be included in other current legislation. All that was needed was to pull these under the existing legislation and focus on making that work, rather than adding another layer.”

Conclusion

The predominant theme that emerged from the discussion was that ownership in health and safety practice and policy is the crucial issue when it comes to establishing a positive health and safety culture. Although nothing will work without support from the top, it is equally important to embrace and involve the workforce.

At an even deeper level, health and safety needs to be about really changing attitudes, about a shift in perception that paints health and safety as carrot rather than stick. What needs to be fostered is the notion that it might take half an hour longer to put scaffolding up rather than teeter on the end of a ladder, but nobody would argue that it isn’t half an hour very well spent.

The health and safety profession is increasingly looking for the carrot, to find ways to motivate and drive people to do a good job and do it safely. In this endeavour, training will be the key, arming health and safety managers with management skills to help them understand their workers’ motivations and behaviour better, and finding ways to demonstrate the benefits of health and safety to the workforce.

For a copy of the full report of this event, Health and safety in the construction industry: round table July 2008, visit the ‘Resources’ section of the RRC website, www.rrc.co.uk

Gary Fallaize is managing director of RRC Training.