Abstract
Occupational safety in the construction industry still represents a relevant problem at a global level. In fact, the complexity of working activities in this sector requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond normative compliance to guarantee safer working conditions. In particular, empirical research on the factors influencing the unsafe behavior of workers needs to be augmented. Thus, the relationship between human factors and safety management issues following a bottom-up approach was investigated. In particular, an easy-to-use procedure that can be used to better address workers’ safety needs augmenting the company’s safety climate and supporting safety management issues was developed. Such an approach, based on the assessment of human reliability factors, was verified in a real case study concerning the users of concrete mixer trucks. The results showed that the majority of human failures were action and retrieval errors, underlining the importance of theoretical and practical training programs as a means to improve safety behavior. In such a context, information and communication activities also resulted beneficially to augment the company’s safety climate. The proposed approach, despite its qualitative nature, allows a clearer understanding of workers’ perceptions of hazards and their risk-taking behavior, providing practical cues to monitor and improve the behavioral aspects of safety climate. Hence, these first results can contribute to augmenting safety knowledge in the construction industry, providing a basis for further investigations on the causalities related to human performances, which are considered a key element in the prevention of accidents.
Highlights
The construction industry is considered a very risky sector [1], since the rate of accidents is constantly high at a global level [2]
The results showed that the majority of human failures were action and retrieval errors, underlining the importance of theoretical and practical training programs as a means to improve safety behavior
In literature numerous studies exist on safety management in the construction industry, our proposition aimed at reducing the gap related to the analysis of factors influencing unsafe behaviors at the task level, i.e., focusing on the behavioral side of the safety climate by means of a bottom-up approach
Summary
The construction industry is considered a very risky sector [1], since the rate of accidents is constantly high at a global level [2]. Specific work situations should be considered with more attention, since ensuring the safety of the various tasks is the precondition for ensuring a higher level of safety from both a project and an operative perspective [9] This means that more attention has to be paid to the analysis of human behavior [10], and to the factors that can impact on it, such as stress, training, experience, etc. Liao et al [19], analyzing several construction case studies at the project level, put forward the close relationship between safety climate and human factors This aspect was highlighted by Glendon and Stanton [20], who advised safety managers to consider the analysis of human error to better understand human interaction with working tasks, augmenting the safety climate by means of a bottom-up approach.
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