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Construction Safety Management: Turning Policy into Action

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A safety plan can be approved, filed, and available in the site office while the people doing the work still face unresolved hazards. The question for a project team is whether that plan changes what happens at the workface.

The May 2024 paper Safety Management at Construction Projects: A Case Study of Infrastructure Projects, by Mohammad Mamon Hamdan and Salahaldeen Hamdan, examines safety management through infrastructure construction examples.[1]

Give responsibility the authority to act

The authors describe a safety management system built around policy, responsibilities, implementation, and evaluation. They emphasise shared responsibility and the authority needed to address hazards.[1]

A practical interpretation is to connect every important safety requirement to a person and a decision. Who verifies readiness? Who resolves an unsafe condition? Who can stop the activity? Who confirms that work may resume?

These questions make accountability visible. They also help supervisors understand what they must do when the planned working conditions are no longer present.

Make the assessment useful at the workface

The paper discusses activity-specific risk assessment and control selection. Its infrastructure examples include excavations, live-road work, lifting, work at height, heat exposure, machinery, and welfare facilities.[1]

For a project meeting, a useful way to interpret this is to ask the team to explain an assessment in ordinary language: what could go wrong during this activity, and what must be in place before it begins?

An assessment becomes easier to use when it refers to the actual location, sequence, equipment, and people involved. A supervisor should be able to connect its contents to the work being carried out that day.

Consider an illustrative situation: the planned access route is unavailable when a crew arrives. The useful management question is whether the proposed replacement has been assessed and accepted before the crew proceeds. The paperwork should help resolve that decision.

Ask whether the control is effective

The authors discuss a hierarchy of controls, placing elimination and substitution ahead of measures that depend more heavily on procedures or personal protective equipment.[1]

The practical lesson is to examine what each proposed control actually achieves. A warning communicates a danger; a physical change can alter the conditions that create exposure. Those functions deserve separate consideration when reviewing a work method.

Project teams can make this discussion concrete by asking: what would have to fail for someone to be harmed, and how will we know that the intended protection is functioning?

Close the gap between observation and correction

The study highlights daily inspections, safety observation and non-conformance reporting, and investigation of accidents and near-misses.[1]

My practical interpretation is that a report should begin a clear chain of action. A useful record identifies the concern, its location, the responsible person, and the evidence needed to confirm correction.

For example, “action completed” tells a reviewer little if the record does not explain what changed. A photograph, inspection record, or documented verification can make the closure decision understandable to someone who was not present.

The same principle applies to investigation. A team gains more from explaining why an unwanted event became possible than from simply recording that it occurred. The resulting action should address that explanation.

Use project meetings to test readiness

One useful question for the next coordination meeting is: “Which activity still has an unresolved safety condition, and who is responsible for resolving it?”

That question makes safety part of production planning. It gives managers a concrete issue to resolve, gives supervisors a clear expectation, and keeps attention on the conditions under which people will perform the work.

Reference

[1] Hamdan, M. M., & Hamdan, S. (2024). Safety Management at Construction Projects: A Case Study of Infrastructure Projects. Engineering and Science Hub Journal, 1(4), 10–19. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11240995.

Read the original paper on ResearchGate.

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