Investigating the relationships between safety climate and safety performance of retrofitting works

Abstract

Retrofitting work is becoming increasingly important to a sustainable built environment as it helps reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumptions. However, retrofitting works are mostly small projects and predominantly undertaken by small-medium sized contractors, thus prone to safety problems as these contractors do not have sufficient resources for safety measures. Moreover, despite that safety has been widely researched in the construction industry, research into the safety of retrofitting works has been limited in the literature. As safety climate is a widely recognised construct to explain and predict safety performance, this paper presents an on-going PhD study aiming to examine the safety climate factors of retrofitting works and investigate the relationships between safety climate and safety performance. After refining the research gap through a literature review, the data collection will be started by interviewing the retrofitting stakeholders to identify the related safety issues comprising safety attitudes and safe-unsafe behaviours, followed by distributing an online questionnaire targeting the crews of small-medium sized contractors for safety climate measurement due to the lack of breakdown quantitative data (e.g. accidents records/rate, lost work days). Finally, structural equation modelling (SEM) will be employed to examine the quantitative relationships between safety climate and safety performance. This paper will present the research framework of the study, report the initial findings, and give recommendations to improve safety performance of retrofitting works.