5 Performance Principles to Improve Construction Safety Outcomes5 Performance Principles to Improve Construction Safety Outcomes

Even the best workers make mistakes, so construction business owners and managers need to understand that  

At the 2024 International Roofing Expo, Cheryl Ambrose, vice president for enterprise risk management for the National Roofing Contractors Association, shared with attendees five standard principles of “human performance” that she said companies can apply to approach safety differently and more efficiently. Human performance is a measure of workers’ physical and mental readiness to tackle challenges. 

According to Ambrose, traditional safety approaches say: 

Here are the five human performance principles Ambrose suggests instead to improve safety outcomes at construction companies. 

1 | Error is normal. Even high-performance workers make mistakes. 

No amount of training, counseling or motivation can alter human fallibility, according to Ambrose. However, she emphasized that humans are adaptive and a creative group of problem solvers, and it can be helpful to remember that people’s actions are rarely malicious. Instead, they are well meaning behaviors intended to get the job done that have gone awry.   

2 | Blame fixes nothing.  

According to Ambrose, trying to place blame misdirects resources and strategies, taking up mental space with little added value. Deterrence by blaming is not effective, and while finding a person or procedural issue to blame may feel important, it makes error a choice in retrospect. She recommends making a conscious effort to examine safety incidents without automatically seeking to place blame to set your team up for success in the future.  

3 | Learning and improving are vital and must be deliberate.  

Organizations have two choices when responding to failure, said Ambrose: learn and improve or blame and punish. Learning is a deliberate improvement strategy and must include input from the employees closest to the process. Determine how best to encourage honest feedback from your team, particularly when safety issues arise. This could include a regular safety postmortem meeting for each project, a way to submit comments and concerns during jobs or another strategy entirely.

4 | Context influences behavior, and safety systems drive outcomes.  

Individual behavior is influenced by organizational processes and values, but workers also do what they do for a reason—and the reason makes sense given the context at the time, said Ambrose. It is necessary to shift your thinking from asking “Who failed?” to “What failed?”, and to use what you discover to improve any safety systems in place or to introduce new ones. 

5 | How you react and respond to failure matters—especially if you are a leader.  

People achieve high levels of performance because of encouragement and reinforcement from leaders, peers and subordinates, according to Ambrose, and managers must remember that they shape how the organization learns by their reaction to failure.