Effectiveness of on-site communication in residential housing projects

M. L. Djajalaksana, P. R. Zekavat, S. Moon

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

![CDATA[Ineffective communication at work-front is frequently reported to hinder the successful delivery of construction projects. However, the efforts to address this shortcoming mainly revolve around adopting corporate communication strategies at filed-level. But, temporary nature of projects inhibits implementation of strategies developed based on permanent communication arrangement of established organizations. To bridge this gap, this study aims at understanding how effective communication is defined by construction professionals who manage construction processes on-site. Such definition determines requirements of an ideal communication system on-site and accordingly provides a measure to identify inherent characteristics of construction processes that compromise robustness of work-front communication. Finally, the input from selected construction professionals will be analyzed to map existing solutions to identified communication barriers. The mapping is essential to a) modify existing solutions to better overcome the associated communication obstacle and b) craft new solutions to tackle overlooked communication flaws. As residential projects are known for their relatively simpler structure, they have been selected as the starting point of the attempt to modify project communication based on the constraints imposed by construction process. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 10 construction professionals selected through judgmental sampling. It means that the research team picked one representative per residential building project based on overview of construction site, available personnel, and the likelihood of sharing the information sought in the study. Careful content analysis resulted in extraction of similarities, differences and trends from interview manuscripts that were required to deliver research objectives. The results surfaced nine attributes of effective communication on jobsite. Interestingly, fitness of the communication medium for the purpose of transferred message ranked the most significant factor assuring integrity of the communication. Accordingly, our results show that although linguistics means is the most problematic communication medium on an active jobsite, dialogue within a crew is less vulnerable to failure. Lastly, analysis of data corpus revealed a trend towards creation of an informal communication protocol as a natural response to the lack of officially defined communication conduits.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction and Mining (ISARC 2017), Taipei, Taiwan, 28 June-1 July 2017
PublisherInternational Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Pages1093-1098
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781510844735
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
EventInternational Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction -
Duration: 28 Jun 2017 → …

Conference

ConferenceInternational Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction
Period28/06/17 → …

Keywords

  • communication
  • construction industry
  • construction projects

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