Developing resilience for safety management systems in the building repair and maintenance sector

Abstract

The repair and maintenance (R&M) of buildings are becoming increasingly important, given the significant growth of existing building stock. The safety performance of R&M works has become alarmingly low. Building R&M works are characterised by aspects such as the need to work in confined workspaces, at a height, in hard-to-access places and in occupied work environments; the changing nature of work tasks and scope; the need to adhere to tight working schedules; and the use of sophisticated technologies, which create a dynamic and complex work arrangement for building R&M workers. Traditional safety management systems (SMSs) have played a key role in reducing safety incidents at workplaces; however, these systems may be insufficient to deal with the varying and unforeseen safety risks emerging because of the inherent complexity associated with building R&M works. The main reason for this problem is that these classical systems stress on minimising uncertainty-as opposed to coping with uncertainty-because they consider safety issues to derive from deviations that must be removed. In contrast, resilience engineering, which is identified as a complementary to the conventional SMS, assists in coping with the uncertainty caused by the complexity in socio-technical systems. Therefore, resilience must be engineered into SMSs to address the safety risks that occur owing to the complex nature of R&M works. To this end, this study aims to develop resilience for the SMSs in building R&M companies. The specific objectives are (1) to identify the dimensions of resilience for SMSs in building R&M companies, (2) to identify the drivers of resilience for SMSs and (3) to examine the impact of resilience for SMSs on the safety performance of building R&M companies. To achieve these research objectives, this study developed 16 research hypotheses based on the existing body of knowledge. A quantitative research approach and a survey research design were employed to test the research hypotheses. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey with building R&M professionals from 145 Australian building R&M contracting companies. Using the analysis results, this study identifies three dimensions of resilience for the SMSs of building R&M companies: people, place and system resilience. This study establishes that resilience for SMSs has a positive impact on the safety performance of building R&M companies.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English