Effectiveness Evaluation Model for Frontline Worker Safety Intervention: An Exploratory Case Study of a Construction Prefabrication Company

• Author / Creator

  Chang, Jihun

• Frontline foremen and workers play a critical role in implementing management’s safety policies and procedures. Despite the ultimate position in safety organization of frontline foremen and workers, variations in safety competency and acceptance level are often neglected, which leads to diverse perceptions of safety instructions. This study aims to explore practical measures to evaluate how effectively safety programs and techniques are implemented at a frontline level. The challenges associated with evaluating frontline intervention effectiveness are (1) unclear establishment of evaluation criteria for ongoing safety intervention; (2) difficulty in identifying the intervention effectiveness due to infrequency of an incident occurrence; and (3) infeasibility of comparative study due to confounding or effect modifications. Since communication skills as well as competence for hazard awareness and response are fundamental and integral aspects of frontline safety management, pre-task planning and worksite inspection are investigated to determine the effectiveness of intervention implementation. Based on the rare event count data, a Poisson regression model is deployed which takes into account no-lost-time incident cases of 156 workers and their evaluation factors in a construction pre-fabrication company. To achieve statistical homogeneity, some demographic factors (e.g., supervisor seniority, worker experience, craft size, position, shop & shift) as confounding and effect modification variables are applied in each regression test. The results of the factor analyses suggest that increasing content coverage rates, longhand description in the pre-task planning, and safety communication times are critical factors to reduce incident rates. Hazard identification and workplace inspection frequencies are relatively less effective factors. For the evaluation variables subject to effect modifications, it is found through stratum analysis that the longhand description practice is effective for less experienced supervisors (<19 years). The safety communication is helpful to juniors (<35 years) versus seniors (35~71 years). In addition, company-wide time lag analysis demonstrates that hazard identification improves safety performance over the course of a 4-month term.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Construction safety
  • Exploratory study
  • Prefabriaction
  • Frontline
  • Poisson regression
  • Interventions

• Graduation date

  Fall 2016

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R36H4D176

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.