Safety champions to the rescue

When Build Safe UAE launched its new programme to introduce construction worker champions to the industry, it was unaware that safety records in the sector would improve by 38 percent in just 12 weeks. Rebecca Goozee looks at how health and safety can be improved further still.

“The workers are becoming more actively involved in OHS prevention activities and are speaking up when they see things are unsafe, plus they are more readily identifying risks - their perception of risk has definitely improved”
-Elias McGrath

The Build Safe 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 construction industry of the United Arab Emirates. One of the organisation's set goals is to champion the cause of worker welfare in the industry, although the initiative has little direct engagement with the workforces of its members until now, which is set to change with the emergence of Build Safe UAE Worker Champions. Proposed in September 2009, it has been a short journey to the initiative as it is today: in December 2009, projects and workers were chosen and in February 2010 there was a briefing session to prepare the 'worker champions' before it was launched with a proposed duration of six months. On the pilot's completion in July, BSU will hold a debriefing and share the lessons that have been learnt.

This worker champions group is set to promote and create best practices in their 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.

Initially the worker champion project has been piloted in collaboration with Al Basti & Muktha, Al Habtoor Leighton Group, Murray & Roberts, Al Naboodah Contracting, Dutco Balfour Beatty and Six Construct as a six-month case study to accurately measure and assess its impact. After that it is hoped that the project will expand to include more companies across the region and be used across more construction developments.

The main objective behind the pilot study is to demonstrate to the wider construction industry the true benefits of engaging with the workforce at labour level. Elias McGrath, a Project Manager appointed by Bovis Lend Lease to manage the Build Safe UAE operation, explains how the project took shape: "In this project we selected general labourers from various trades who did not possess any occupational health and safety (OHS) qualifications, but who were selected by their managers as excellent examples from within their workforces as individuals who stood out and demonstrated a constant commitment to delivering every aspect of their daily duties in a safe manner."

McGrath goes on to explain that most of the individuals were chosen because they were leaders by good example; they had previously taken proactive measures in the past to stop or prevent an accident from happening by alerting their management to a potential danger or by directing their colleagues away from a hazardous situation for example. "At the same time, this programme will hopefully develop the skills and understanding of OHS, which could lead to lifting these individuals to greater positions of responsibility," he adds.

The ultimate aim of the pilot project is to demonstrate a statistical improvement in safety performance throughout the 24-week pilot study. By the 12th week, or half way through the six-month pilot scheme, there had been a 35 percent average improvement in safety performance across all six participating organisations, which is a significant achievement and has resulted in improved productivity as a result in reduction of loss time reporting. And as the worker champions continue to make more of an impact, it is expected that safety performance will only continue to improve.

At Dutco Balfour Beatty there was already a health, safety and worker welfare programme in place before the company signed up to the 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 so 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. Construction has reached up to the eighth floor of the structure and there are 1100 workers on site who have so far delivered 339,555 man-hours. Health and safety challenges at the site include working at height with plot area restrictions and ensuring the competence of 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 he knows he will be represented by someone he has chosen ­ and hoped this would improve operations on site," says van der Vyver. "It makes the worker feel important too. It's not just coming from management, that management are pushing everything on the safety officer, but that the workforce has a voice."

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, so when they have people working alongside them and that they are reporting onsite 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 occurring and things like that in the workspace."

Performance

In order to measure improvement performance is recorded weekly and each Sunday the worker champion groups apply a generic audit tool - that was developed specifically for this project - on each of their participating projects. The tool scores the weekly safety performance of the project site according to the number of compliant and non-compliant observations checked in each high-risk work zone. Scores are then collated on the Monday and a group average is produced. "The idea is to promote positive safety behaviours and therefore performance charts are produced and displayed around site, each marked with a percentage score," explains McGrath. "This gives the workforce, and visitors, a snapshot of the up-to-date safety performance on site."

So far, McGrath says that the feedback from the participating companies has been very encouraging. "They have all witnessed an increased awareness of OHS in their workforces. The workers are becoming more actively involved in OHS prevention activities and are speaking up when they see things are unsafe, plus they are more readily identifying risks - their perception of risk has definitely improved. Workers like to be involved and appreciate being engaged proactively rather than reactively after an accident occurs."

And one person who knows this more than most is Jaana Quaintance, Senior Project Manager for Impactt Limited Middle East and North Africa, a company focused on improving working conditions in supply chains to bring business benefits to both ends of the chain. Quaintance actually proposed the idea for the whole focus group back in September 2009, when she was approached by BSU for feedback on how to improve conditions on the site and safety rates. "Our approach at Impactt is change-focused, innovative and practical, and enables companies to mitigate the business risk they face from poor working conditions," she explains.

"We have found in our experience the worker champions model to be helpful for promoting worker engagement in a business, and ensuring that their power as key stakeholders is harnessed for good within that business. Furthermore, our experience has shown that engaging workers in this way can be a cost-effective force for achieving long-lasting and positive change within an organisation."

Quaintance explains that previously whilst there was a lot of work being done at management level to improve health and safety levels across developments, it wasn't necessarily filtering down to the labour level, which is of course a critical part of changing the culture. "The objective was about workers being recognised as stakeholders in health and safety and to empower them to make a difference to health and safety themselves, that's where I came in. Worker engagement isn't a common theme in the Middle East and I was expecting it to be a little more difficult to implement than it was, but in fact the response was great.

"And these worker champions have really become the eyes and ears of the health and safety managers on a daily basis. They've been trained on how to talk to their colleagues about health and safety and how they should react of they find something is not meeting the standards."

Improving processes

Despite the initiative receiving high praise from many of the participants and the workers themselves, McGrath reveals that the project has not always been smooth sailing. Indeed, at the beginning of the project he explains that language communication was one of the biggest challenges that the project had to overcome. "At the very start we brought all the worker champions from each of the five participating companies together in one big room in order to brief them about the programme ahead, why they were selected and what we hoped to achieve. With such a large group of mixed nationalities participating, each with different backgrounds, speaking different languages, it was a huge difficult."

However, McGrath overcame this when they brought in mentors to support each worker champion team. The mentors are all senior OHS managers who are able to communicate with the workers and facilitate their development throughout the programme. "We also meet quarterly with the senior company managers of these organisations to review the challenges on site and address changes to improve the programmes deliverables," he explains. "Recently, for example, we revised the audit tool and simplified it to a check in the box system, which the worker champions responded to favourably. Previously we started with a more technical and timely tool that works using calculations, but the worker champions didn't feel this was very practical, which led to us listening to the feedback from the mentors and redeveloping something to suit, which resulted positively."

It is just this kind of reaction that will ensure the project continues beyond the pilot and expands to more companies and across more developments. The benefits are clear and the costs are nothing - the worker champion tool is excellent for any construction stakeholder to apply to any construction project with a large and multinational workforces. And there is no doubt that the pilot will enable the shortcomings to be seen and structure the initiative to be even better.

At Dutco Balfour Beatty, van der Vyver believes that it is crucial that the project gets rolled out across more developments. "It's not a one off thing for our larger projects, our smaller projects are the more volatile ones and that's where people seem to take more chances so we are certain that we will roll it out across our projects. We might just have one worker champion on a project instead of say four or five, but I definitely predict a full-scale roll out."

There is certainly a lot of potential for it to be used across the board, and it would be fantastic to have worker champion teams actively supporting workers to engage with their colleagues, and tighten the loop between what is coming out of the site in safety reports and what the workers are doing in the following month. Van der Vyver has bigger ideas: "If this kind of project can be taken on worldwide by major companies it will have a huge difference in their workforce, when there is a spokesman for health and safety in the business. It will be a big positive for any company that adopts this worker champion initiative."

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Dangerous conditions

While conditions are changing across the UAE, the same can't be said for the rest of the region - at least not yet. At the end of last year Bahrain's Labour Ministry reported that deaths at construction sites across the country had doubled in the past four years. According to the report that was published by Gulf Daily News, 35 workers died from January to October 2009, compared to 18 in 2005. It also shows that figures are steadily going up with 36 killed last year, 29 in 2007 and 21 in 2006. Occupational health and safety head Abbas Salman Matooq commented that most of those killed had fallen from under construction buildings, been hit by falling debris or become trapped in machinery.

Matooq was companies that flagrantly flouted safety rules, explaining that deaths will continue to increase. "These companies hire cheap labour and purchase cheap equipment to cut costs," Matooq told the paper. "Construction accident inspectors work hard to enforce construction safety laws by distributing safety brochures that are printed in several languages for the workers' safety. But we have noticed that no one follows these rules and that's the reason so many accidents happen."