Construction-Safety Best Practices and Relationships to Safety Performance

Abstract

The construction industry has experienced a great deal of safety improvement after the Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. In the last twenty years, improvements have been made largely due to safety interventions that exceed compliance with government regulations. Researchers have long attempted to identify the most effective safety programs. However, studies in the past focused only on a small subset of potential injury-prevention options. In addition, to date, there has yet to be a study that documents a comprehensive list of safety strategies implemented by industry-leading companies. This research addresses this knowledge gap by creating a comprehensive list of construction-safety strategies from relevant literature and supplementing it with input from an expert panel. Once the strategies were identified (n=104), the research team conducted interviews with representatives from 57 projects in the United States to determine which strategies were implemented on each project and the project’s recordable injury rate (RIR). The data were then analyzed to determine the total proportion of potential strategies implemented and examine the relationship between each strategy and the RIR. The results reveal that 14 strategies differentiate safety performance (P>0.05) and that 22 strategies were implemented by 100% of the sample projects. The implications are that the 22 practices implemented in all projects can now be considered a foundation of a safety program, and the 14 differentiators are the keys to improved safety performance.

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