Increasing safety and productivity on Egyptian building sites

Abstract

Safety and productivity in construction industry of Egypt still suffers from ignorance. This low consideration of safety importance caused escalation of accident rate in construction projects. The paperaims to identify the safety factors most related to productivity, and determine their relative importance as perceived by the target audience. The questionnaire was implemented directly; included 4 specific answers (agree, strongly agree, disagree, and strongly disagree) and consists of 47 questions divided into 7 groups: inspection, monitoring, training, etc. These questions were selected from the previous questionnaires and the questions inspired by the topic of this research. The questionnaire was distributed to 67 target audiences of different categories, including Consultants, Site engineers, Site managers and Workers. The duration of their experience ranges from 0 to more than 15 years, as well as their scientific degrees from Ph.D., Masters, and Bachelor. The following factors are the most important factors of safety and productivity. “Working 7 days per week will increase productivity”, ” increase productivity ", "Rework will decrease safety", " Incentives based on productivity decreases safety", “Compressed schedules affect negatively safety". The results indicated that "worker problems" are the most important among the groups of productive factors followed by "personal protective equipment", "supervisors and subcontractors", "monitoring", "communication skills". The target audience is advised to work strategically to protect workers by continuing to identify, assess and mitigate hazardous conditions and activities in work sites to achieve the highest levels of safety and productivity.

Keywords

• safety
• productivity
• personal protective equipment
• monitoring
• supervisors and subcontractors