A safety elements model for the building construction industry

The construction industry is a dangerous occupation and has the highest fatality rate of any industry in the United States. Although there have been significant improvements in the past few years, there is still a significant amount of work that needs to be done to further reduce the fatality and injury rates among construction workers. It is therefore imperative to identify the common safety practices that are found within construction companies that have above average safety records. The current study explores specifically the non-residential building (NRB) construction companies and takes a look at the available literature over the past 10 years on all safety aspects of the industry. This study identifies significant gaps in the literature. It shows that very little studies have been done in identifying the common safety practices among multiple NRB construction companies and there are no studies that identify the common safety practices among NRB construction companies with above average safety scores. This study’s contribution to research knowledge is the identification of those common safety practices within the safety programs of NRB construction companies with above average safety scores. A survey was done using 55 of the 69 NRB construction companies as identified by OSHA’s 2008 TCR safety rating system. There were 33 completed responses to the Safety Elements Questionnaire (SEQ). There were 9 Safety Elements found to be statistically significantly different among Louisiana NRB construction companies with above and below average safety scores as determined by OSHA’s 2008 TCR Safety rating system. A Safety Elements Model was developed and validated from the results of this study. The Safety Elements Model consists of two Levels. Level I has 9 Safety Elements as mentioned above and they were ranked in order of usage by the 13 NRB construction companies with above average safety scores. Level II has 20 Safety Elements that were ranked in order of usage by 92. 3 % of the 13 NRB construction companies with above average safety scores. It is hoped that the Safety Elements Model, presented in this study, can be used to improve the safety of all construction companies.