Our previous article presented this challenge from the contractors’ perspective. It showed that when everyone is focussed on maintaining profitability, health and safety can become vulnerable to cost cutting. How effective an organisation is at maintaining safety standards on a wind-farm construction site is then determined by the effectiveness of their safety leadership.
This article presents this challenge from the client’s perspective, including comment from Chris Black, Head of Health, Safety and Quality at ScottishPower Renewables and the former chair of the RenewableUK Lessons Learnt Scheme.
Who’s in charge of safety?
The main challenge for producers is how to ensure a safe site. Wind-farm construction sites are complex places in which to enforce and maintain a consistent standard of behavioural safety. A range of contractors are working alongside one another at any one time, bringing together different safety cultures (and often languages) as well as groups who are focussed on completing their own particular part of the project.
By law, it is the principal contractor who should exercise control over its own employees and other contractors working on site. However, as David MacDonald (Civil Engineering Director of Global Construction) said in our last article, how successful the principal contractor is in doing this will depend on the relationships they are able to develop with other contractors on site. Where they have appointed these contractors themselves, they are able to exert influence through their own supply chain. But where contractors are appointed directly by the client, it can sometimes be harder to forge such relationships. Ideally, the behavioural safety programme operated by the principal contractor will ensure that the organisation’s values and accepted behaviours are directing the actions not only of their own employees but also those of sub-contractors. Behavioural safety programmes also work best when managers, supervisors and engineers are using their influence to challenge unsafe acts.
To exercise this influence, managers, supervisors and engineers need to understand their own role as safety leaders and feel confident to intervene on unsafe acts. This exposes a limitation in some behavioural safety programmes which tend to focus exclusively on the behaviour of front line workers rather than the people with the most authority, and therefore the most influence on site.
Chris Black “effective safety leadership creates a safety culture in which everyone recognises the role he plays in maintaining a safe site.” Where contractors, such as Global Construction, demonstrate this level of commitment to safety leadership, they set themselves apart from their competitors. Producers like ScottishPower Renewables recognise that they also need to take a more hands-on approach if safety standards are to improve.
Safety Leadership among producers
In the first instance, producers must clearly communicate their own organisation’s values and the standards of behaviour they expect of all those working on site. Chris “with our next project we’re going to start with a seminar for all key contractors in which our values and expectations will be communicated and contractors will be encouraged to share their experience and best practice. Contractors will establish priorities for running a safe site and the relationships developed will provide a sound foundation for the way they communicate through the project.”
Client organisations, like ScottishPower Renewables, are also addressing the skills gap by delivering cultural safety programmes for managers and supervisors. For example, the company is developing a programme that addresses the legal requirements, as well as the behaviours the organisation expects their managers and supervisors to adopt, particularly in relation to incident investigation.
Furthermore, before a manager or supervisor takes up their role on a new project they will attend a two day course introducing them to ScottishPower Renewables’ safety culture. Those attending will often come from different contractor companies – this will help develop understanding and communication between the participating groups, ensuring a more effective working relationship on site. At the end of the day, the client organisation has the authority to enforce compliance with its own safety standards. However, as Chris explains, “rather than getting to a crisis point where the client wants to withdraw support from a contractor, we want to identify and sort out problems in advance so the project starts on a good footing.”
Given the complex nature of wind farm construction sites, it is critical that client and contractor organisations get it right on safety. As we have seen, the key challenge is in making sure the different contractors on site communicate effectively and operate a consistent standard of behaviour.
To address this situation, client organisations like ScottishPower Renewables recognise that they need a hands-on approach, particularly during the early stages of the project, by providing greater resource and support. Their objective is to create the right safety culture by encouraging transparency and challenge between all parties involved on site. This approach to safety leadership is consistent with that taken by forward thinking contractors like Global Construction. Our next article presents a case study to show what Global Construction is doing to create such a culture among its own staff.
Editor's note: This article was kindly provided by Esther Walker, Co-founder and Director of Forum Interactive. Dr Walker is a social scientist, facilitator and gestalt therapist. She specializes in the influence of work culture on the way individuals think and behave and the interventions which support safe and healthy work practices.
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