Cultivating a ‘just’ culture in construction industry to improve Health and Safety management systems
2021
Within the last decades,safety statistics in the UK construction industry have reached a plateau and cultural
changes are required for further improvement of occupational health and safety (H&S) management
systems. The aim of this research is to understand how the UK construction industry can improve H&S
reporting to learn from failures and near misses based on experience of aviation and aerospace industries
that made a successful shift from a ‘blame’ to a ‘just’ culture. The reason is that H&S culture remains
undeveloped within the industry. Cultivation of a culture that can facilitate bottom-up reporting and
learning from failures and near misses is difficult due to fragmented nature and the complexity of
construction programme and project operations. The industry that is criticised for being inward looking and
slow in learning could benefit from safety practices of other safety-critical industries, rather than take a
position of its uniqueness. An interpretative methodology is applied in this research. Thematic analysis is
supported by cognitive mapping technique. The findings revealed that H&S practices in the construction
industry are affected by the lack of consistency across construction sites due to fragmented supply chain,
‘silo’ project culture and a tendency to blame individuals for human error. The levels of engagement with
bottom-up reporting are quite low and the most frequently mentioned reasons are transactional approach
to H&S by the management, figure-pointing behaviours, lack of robust follow-up processes and lack of trust.
H&S regulations, norms and guidelines do not include all possible safety issues specific to unique project
environments. Cultivation of a ‘just’ culture could help the industry to go beyond H&S legal compliance and
change attitude to safety reporting. Despite the differences, construction organisations can learn from
aviation and aerospace industries’ accountability for the systems they design and from their proactive
approaches to dealing with human error and encouraging and facilitating self-reporting.
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