Identifying the significant factors affecting the masonry labour productivity in building construction projects in India

Abstract

Masonry workers on construction sites carry out various jobs under constraints and challenges while meeting their targets. These constraints are linked with certain factors that critically affect the masonry labour productivity. Addressing these factors by relative ranking will aid in providing clear knowledge of improving the productivity of masonry labour in building construction, which is a dire necessity in developing countries like India. The objective of this article is to identify and rank the significance of factors affecting masonry labour productivity in building construction projects in India. For this purpose, a structured questionnaire survey with 38 factors that were observed as adversely affecting the masonry labour productivity was prepared and collected opinions from 120 construction site personnel working in various organisations in Telangana state. These 38 factors were categorized into five groups, namely: (1) work force, (2) management team, (3) working condition, (4) material and equipment, (5) unforeseen and unfamiliar factors. All the factors within these groups were analysed using Relative Importance Index (RII) technique. Average score of RII at group level is calculated. Work force-related factors were found to be the majority affecting factors with average RII of 78.4%. Major factors in the top five list with RII > 0.8 were related to work force and working conditions. The results obtained from ranking the factors gives good opportunity in choosing the significant factors as predictors for developing a model for masonry labour productivity valuation. Productivity valuations can aid the construction personnel in developing and managing the masonry labour productivity benchmarks in building construction projects.