Counting the cost of accountability

Safety is a growing concern for the Middle East’s construction firms – and following a spate of high-profile accidents at sites across the region over the summer, the industry is being forced to respond. In one four-week period alone earlier this year, two Bangladeshi workers were killed when a slab of concrete fell on top of them at a construction site in Abu Dhabi, three workers died on a site in Sharjah after the scaffolding they were working on collapsed, four others were killed at Ansar Mall in Sharjah after their maintenance cradle failed, while a man died in Bahrain when he fell from the third floor of a building under construction in Hoora.

Such tragedies have forced the industry to take a long hard look at itself - and the conclusion is that more must be done. "The accidents reflect bad safety practices, a lack of effective management and complacency about safety within organisations," said Peter Neville, spokesperson for BuildSafe UAE, at the time. "In some cases, training standards are not that high, in others there are enormous issues with competence, supervision and general safety awareness. Workers are too often being asked to carry out tasks that they are either not qualified to do or not confident doing, and they are not properly supervised."

Indeed, according to research released earlier this year, around 85 percent of on-site accidents and lost time injuries are behavioural - and as such, project managers, crew chiefs and foremen clearly have an important role to play in ensuring workers follow safety guidelines. But for the right culture to be maintained on-site, increasingly it is falling to senior management to set the tone and embed a safety culture throughout the entire organisation.

Dubai-based Al Habtoor Leighton (HLG) is one firm that has decided to take a stronger stand against safety complacency within the industry. "Health and safety is paramount in our business," says Chief Executive Laurie Voyer. "It's a key factor in the decisions that we make and we would like to think that moving forward it will become a key point of differentiation from our competitors."

One of the growing issues is the increasing complexity of the projects firms such as HLG are working on. "Jobs change from day-to-day and week-to-week, and it's important that we guide our people through that journey in as safe a manner as possible," he says. "We need to be able to educate our workers to deal with the risks that come about with particular tasks, and also with the changing environment - whether that be from shift work to daytime work, or from job to job."

And, as Voyer points out, it's not just about issuing protective clothing and equipment or having the right signage in place on site. "It's about changing behaviour and making sure that our workers understand the risks they're challenged with and the tasks that they are asked to perform," he says. "For that we are prepared to remunerate them appropriately and to make sure they have the right levels of accommodation. We are keen to make sure that they are well looked after."

Indeed, there are many factors that drive a safety-focused culture but Voyer believes the most important is that the board and senior management understand the importance of safety - both to the health of workers and the long-term health of the company. "Without this, it won't ever materialise at the job level," he says. "Accountability was not something that was widely accepted in our business up until about 6-12 months ago, but it's a sign of how quickly attitudes are changing that our employees and our supervisors understand that they have to be accountable for the things they do on our sites. They have to be accountable for the planning that occurs on our sites, and they have to be accountable for safety too, because we manage such a large number of people on each of our worksites."

As a result, Voyer and his team have tried hard - through a mixture of mandates, metrics and education - to make safety a key management priority. "We've made it part of the culture of the business, but we're also making it more of a moral obligation on the part of our principles, our shareholders, our customers and the people who work with our business. We want to make it clear that we must be committed to making HLG a safe business, with safe attitudes and safe measures on our sites."

This has not always been the case within the industry, as the earlier examples unfortunately demonstrate, and HLG has certainly not been exempt from criticism. However, Voyer plans to use the experiences of the past to improve the firm's approach to safety in the future. "We're on a journey of continuous improvement in terms of how we want to take our safety culture forward," he says. "It's about communicating our successes, communicating the policies that we have, as well as looking at the issues that concern us and the areas where we want to eliminate poor practices."

HLG runs its own training centre dedicated to educating employees as to the value of safety, has several safety committees and holds so-called 'toolbox sessions' for workers and managers to drive the next level of change into the organisation. The company also requires senior managers to carry out regular audits of their projects in order to report back to the board with regards to the progress being made in terms of improving the safety culture.

The benefits of a strong safety culture are multiple, he explains. "We've seen between 20-30 percent improvement in productivity on our sites as a result of a focus on safety. When there's a lot more pride in the site, a lot more concern about what we do, we've seen a reduction in defect of work, seen a reduction in wastage and we've seen a reduction in the total man-hours needed to perform the tasks across the site. Plus, the sites are more pleasant to work on."

The final challenge is ensuring client engagement and awareness as to the importance of safety. "I know some of our clients probably don't care so much about the levels of safety on our sites, but I think it is increasingly becoming a trend amongst our more discerning clients. Certainly some of the projects that we've been involved in where there are international brands involved require a much greater focus on safety. They are looking for a different safety climate on their sites than we may have traditionally faced in this region. And we need them to understand that we will deliver them a project to international safety standards."

"Clients are increasingly asking more of us these days in regards to quality, timeliness of completion, cost of contracts, etc.," concludes Voyer. "As such, there's no reason why we shouldn't be taking the high moral ground in return, especially with regards to producing our product safely. We owe it to ourselves, to the clients and to the workers themselves."

Build Safe UAE

The BuildSafe UAE (BSU) initiative was set up in 2007 to identify and promote agreed health, safety and welfare standards for the benefit of all workers in the UAE's construction industry. One of the organisation's set goals is to champion the cause of worker welfare in the industry through a project called BuildSafe UAE Worker Champions.

The aim of the worker champions group - initially a BuildSafe UAE-inspired collaboration between Al Basti & Muktha, Al Habtoor Leighton Group, Murray & Roberts, Al Naboodah Contracting, Dutco Balfour Beatty and Six Construct formed as a six-month pilot - is to promote and create best practices in the member companies' respective businesses by working closely with the Build Safe initiative to ensure that it is in tune with the needs and perspectives of workers. In addition to their respective discipline work, the worker champions will work with managers to support their respective businesses workers, activities and facilities in order to promote fewer and fewer accidents. Champions have also been asked to discuss how health, safety and worker welfare on site could be improved, provide feedback to management and BSU on a regular basis and identify how BSU information could be made more effective to improve the outcome of the initiative.

By driving safety from the workforce up through the management, it is hoped that construction safety issues will be addressed and rectified. By engaging the workforce positively and collaborating with them a culture to improve the performance of companies who successfully engage with their workforces and constantly maintain good performance records.

Case study: Dutco Balfour Beatty

At Dutco Balfour Beatty there was already a health, safety and worker welfare programme in place before the company signed up to the BuildSafe UAE Worker Champions initiative. "We had focused on the idea of using a worker champion to portray the image of safety amongst our workforce and we were busy putting the guy in training when the BSU campaign came along. As such, we decided to get involved and put that person into the initiative," explains Steven van der Vyver, HSE and Quality Manager at Dutco Balfour Beatty.

The company chose the Al Ali Multi Complex & Novotel Hotel in Barsha, Dubai, as its pilot project site. Health and safety challenges at the site include working at height with plot area restrictions and ensuring the competence of the workforce, with the aim to promote safety by making the project zero harm by 2012.

"We found that our chosen project would be too big for one champion alone, so we decided to get the workers to decide on another three people that they would like to see as their representatives and we put these three into the programme as well. We decided that it should come from the worker - they should be part and parcel of the selection process so that they know they will be represented by someone they have chosen - and hoped this would improve operations on site," says van der Vyver. "It makes the worker feel important too. They feel that it's not just coming from management, that management are pushing everything on the safety officer, but that the workforce has a voice as well."

Van der Vyver explains that the project site has been divided into seven areas, which is further broken down into five zones. "If we find two to three people not wearing safety glasses in a zone, the zone scores a zero if they don't comply and we treat the entire zone as non-compliant." He goes on to explain that operations at the firm have so far improved immensely. "Normally we would have someone in safety speak to the workers and it will have an effect for a while, but it's soon forgotten. But when they have people working alongside them that are reporting on site conditions on a weekly basis, they tend to think more. No doubt it's had a profound impact on our business - less accidents, fewer cases of onsite conditions violations occurring and greater productivity and morale."