Developing a maturity model and metrics to evaluate the occupational health and safety performance of sustainable building projects in the Manitoba construction industry
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Despite recent efforts aimed at promoting sustainability, very little has been done to integrate health and safety into the sustainability evaluation of the built environment. This has made sustainable building projects more prone to incidents than non-sustainable ones. The goal of this research was to evaluate the health and safety performance of sustainable building projects in Manitoba. This research involved developing and validating a Sustainable Health and Safety Maturity Model consisting of 251 critical to safety practices organized into 22 safety maturity drivers. The maturity model was implemented on 20 sustainable building projects and 21 non-sustainable ones using a questionnaire survey. The research also developed 34 performance metrics following a detailed literature review and validated them by expert judgment before implemented them on seven sustainable building projects and seven non-sustainable ones. The maturity model results were correlated to performance metric results to investigate the relationship between maturity and performance. Findings from the research confirmed the validity of the 22 safety maturity drivers of the maturity model and 25 of the 34 metrics. The results showed that sustainable building projects had a slightly higher health and safety maturity than non-sustainable ones; however, the difference was statistically insignificant. Larger-sized companies had more mature health and safety practices compared to small sized companies. The most mature safety maturity drivers were “safety policy and standard implementation” and “safety inspections” while the least mature were “project team selection” and “alcohol and drug testing”. The research found that sustainable buildings had higher incident rates by 12.7% than non-sustainable one; however, the difference was statistically insignificant. Also, a project’s health and safety maturity was strongly correlated to its incident rates. The percentage of workers with unsafe behaviour based on conducted safety observations was strongly correlated with the percentage of workers who attended safety meetings. This research is the first in Canada to evaluate the health and safety maturity and performance of sustainable building projects. The research contributes to the existing body of knowledge in the field which can be translated to evidence-based guidance for stakeholders in the construction industry in order to make for safer sustainable buildings.