AN EVALUATION OF SAFETY PERFORMANCE MEASURES FOR CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

There are various measures of safety performance for construction projects. Although the metric involving the incidence of lost workday/restricted work activity injuries per 200,000 hours of worker exposure has been used for many years; other measures have also evolved in recent years. The incidence rate of injuries is the measure frequently employed as an industry standard. Despite this, these types of measures have the distinct disadvantage of focusing on the negative aspects of safety performance. That is, safety performance is only good when injuries do not occur. The occurrence of injuries, a negative parameter, generates concern. Information on the physical jobsite conditions, as determined through project safety inspections, provide a measure of conditions and work behavior that do not involve the actual incidence of injuries. Similarly, the evaluation of near misses measures events that could have resulted in an injury, but did not. Behavior based worker observation data is yet another measure that collects information on both safe behavior and unsafe behavior. Worker safety perception surveys provide yet another glimpse of the safety picture on a project. The advantages and disadvantages of using these measures of performance should be understood.