Behavior-based safety management in Hong Kong's construction industry

Abstract

A behavior-based approach to industrial safety management has been advocated by many authors and has been found to effectively improve safety performance in different industrial settings and on different continents. This paper reports on the implementation of a behavior-based safety management program in the Hong Kong construction industry. The behavior-based safety management techniques of performance measurement, participative goal setting, and the provision of performance feedback were introduced in a carefully controlled field experiment on seven public housing construction sites in Hong Kong. The paper describes this experiment and explains how the program was implemented. The results of the experiment were mixed. Behavior-based safety techniques were highly effective in bringing about improved performance in site housekeeping, but significant improvements in access to heights were only observed on two of the seven sites, and there was found to be no significant improvement in the use of bamboo scaffolding during the experimental intervention. The paper presents these results and discusses factors that may have contributed to the limited effectiveness of the techniques in the latter two performance categories.