Improving health and safety culture - a guide for construction clients

Abstract: Many accidents and a general poor health and safety performance for both the construction industry and other high reliability industries have been blamed on the poor health and safety (H&S) culture that was prevalent at the time. Addressing H&S culture is therefore a very important step to eliminating accidents and thereby improve the general H&S performance within an organisation or industry. The current paper will therefore report on findings from an empirical study on improving H&S performance in a construction project and will also present a guide of how to improve the construction client’s H&S culture. The research conducted in South Africa and Botswana and whose results were modelled using structural equation modelling, found that with a better H&S culture, clients had a positive influence on H&S performance of construction projects. The client H&S culture was characterized by leadership, involvement, procedures, commitment, communication and competence (LIP+3C). A positive manifest of these factors in the client entity entailed a better H&S performance at project level. This paper will therefore present a guide on how construction clients may improve their H&S culture and thereby impact positively on project’s H&S performance. Further, the guide will exemplify how the concept of H&S culture may be operationalised in order to benefit from a concept that has been mooted as the panacea for the H&S problem in the construction industry as well as the concept that has been at the centre of major industrial disasters