Developing Key Safety Management Factors for Construction Projects in China: A Resilience Perspective

Abstract

It is acknowledged that construction safety is pivotal to the project management objectives. Meanwhile, the concept of resilience provides an effective and pragmatic countermeasure to improve the safety management level of construction projects. However, the “resilience” has not gained considerable attention in the construction safety management system. In this context, the paper aims to develop the key safety management factors for construction projects from the resilience perspective. Firstly, the theoretical framework and key safety management factors of construction safety management system based on the resilience theory are proposed. The importance of each factor is then obtained by using the method of structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that information management, material and technology management, organization management and personnel management would improve the safety and resilience of the project. Specifically, improving the resilience of information flow to strengthen the interaction among elements of the system can enhance the safety management level. These findings can be used as references for construction safety managers to improve the abilities of preventing safety accidents and recovering after safety accidents.

Factors Influencing Safety on Construction Projects (fSCPs): Types and Categories

“…This allows the company's dynamics and projects to be better understood and for the broad promotion of a safety-oriented organisational culture [29]. Thus, together with efficient information and material management and the use of technological tools, it is possible to develop a resilient safety culture in construction projects [30][31][32].…”

“…On the other hand, categories of factors have been proposed from the perspective of resilient safety management, i.e., the generation of a capacity for "defence" before an accident and "recovery" after an accident. These consider dimensions associated with organisational management, personnel management associated with the individual safety responsibility of each employee, information management of safety and accident processes and the correct administration and maintenance of materials and equipment involved in safety [31]. In addition, safety awareness and organisational culture are considered relevant aspects [30].…”

“…A1-1-Safety rules: general or specific company regulations on safety issues that must be applied to projects [7,26,34,35,43,44]; • A1-2-Rule compliance: level of compliance with the general or specific regulations of the company on security matters that must be applied to the projects [15,27,31,42,45,46]; • A1-3-Paperwork of regulations: compliance with the procedures on security issues that must be applied to the projects [15,27,47].…”

“…D2-69-Competence: skills that the worker has developed in safety matters that make him/her have safer behaviours and awareness of the risks associated with the tasks performed [10,26,29,99,115]; • D2-70-Safety experience: ability of the worker to securely face tasks due to the fact of previous training or experiences [20,28,35,82,102,116] The knowledge that the worker has on safety issues whether it be regulations, best practices or lessons learned, along with the level of access to this information. This is key to generating a long-term prevention culture [7,31,35,37,85]; • D2-74-Hazard/Safety awareness: Level of assimilation of the hazards and risks associated with the different tasks he/she performs, along with the consequences of his/her actions. Promoting more awareness about the consequences of safety (best or worse) practices makes behaviours much safer [20,34,106,117]; • D2-75-Skill/quality of worker: Level of professionalisation of the worker, both in the specific tasks performed and in safety knowledge.…”

“…Promoting more awareness about the consequences of safety (best or worse) practices makes behaviours much safer [20,34,106,117]; • D2-75-Skill/quality of worker: Level of professionalisation of the worker, both in the specific tasks performed and in safety knowledge. It is not necessarily just senior workers that have safer behaviours than junior ones, but there is a direct correlation with the qualifications of the workers [20,31,33,43,75]; • D2-76-Subcontractors and contractors' prequalification on safety: evaluation of the safety knowledge and rules of subcontracted work teams and alignment with the rules of the principal contractor before they enter the worksite [15,34,53,83,117]; • D2-77-Worker age: related to much more experience in security issues at a practical level but also to the persistence of some bad practices. This is an important factor when identifying forms of training and developing an organisational safety culture [10,15,86,112,115,116].…”