Tony Roscoe at Implexis Consulting says safety culture in construction can begin with tidiness.
I am currently working with a client who has a very small, but very busy construction site. These sites always raise their own challenges, particularly around things like site segregation and simultaneous operations, along with the very human challenge of everyone getting along on site.
Within any small working space, the continual challenge is always housekeeping, especially its impact on health and safety. This is a ongoing issue for this site and something that we emphasise to staff on a regular basis.
So why is housekeeping something that we must stay on top of so much? Well, the cause is simple, it is easier, quicker and more energy efficient, to dump something than to go and put it away properly. If we’re honest, I’m sure that we would all admit to having done that at some point.
We are all the product of millions of years of evolution, for much of which our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. As hunter-gatherers, if you do not know where your next meal is coming from, saving energy is very important.
We are therefore designed to save energy and we find really creative ways to do that, and we see this in accident reports all the time. The simplest way by far to save energy is to do nothing, to leave something where it shouldn’t be, rather than to put it away or to throw it away.
We know that the key is to drive ownership of the site / area, combined with a clear understanding of what good looks like; this is in effect what 5S is trying to drive. There is however a key part to achieving this ownership, an understanding of the “why” we do this.
One thing that is also designed into us is “storytelling”. Research has shown that storytelling is an incredibly effective way to get a message across and to make it stick.
To bring this together, I will go back to my client’s small site and back to the inspiration for this article. A conversation around housekeeping in which I was explaining the importance of looking at the small things, the discarded items.
Tony Roscoe, Director at Implexis Consulting
In order to explain why it is important that we look at these, I asked the person I was with to think about their garden shed. When your shed is tidy, have you noticed that you put things back in place? You take the time to keep it tidy. However, it only takes one thing (often something bulky) that you “just leave there for a while”. From that point, everything else that goes back in your shed is thrown back in. Not put back into place, just put anywhere that you can reach (which over time becomes further and further away from where it should be) and the piles of “stuff” become bigger and bigger.
Anyone with a shed I’m sure, has experienced this effect. When you step back and think about how it happened, it was back to one thing not being put back in place. Housekeeping is therefore like your garden shed, once things start to not be put back into place, it can snowball.
We see this effect in the culture of a site. When someone joins a tidy site, they will generally keep it tidy. However, when someone joins a messy site, they add to the mess.
The final question then is simple, how is your shed?
