Barriers to safety implementation: A cost-benefit analysis

Abstract

Occupational health and safety within any organization is very important as each person on work site or in office has the right to go home safely. Unfortunately, worker safety is not dealt with much care in the construction sector. Due to unavailability or weak regulation, construction businesses prefer profit over workers‟ life. Several accidents, near misses and fatalities are reported each year at construction sites. Since construction industry is vital to a country‟s economy, a proper mechanism by which occupational safety can be implemented is the need of hour. With an aim to find the barriers to safety implementation and figure out the financial benefits of such implementation, this study identifies a number of safety barriers and percentages of different safety cost through literature review. Further, data is collected from industry on the identified barriers and cost of safety is acquired from experts through questionnaire survey. Afterwards, impact of barriers on safety cost is studied to highlight the benefits which can be reaped by proper safety implementation. To validate the effectiveness of safety investment, a cost-benefit analysis is performed on real projects and safety implementation strategies are developed to help construction industry effectively and beneficially implement safety.