Gammon Construction is a leading regional construction services company, headquartered out of Hong Kong and with operations and offices across South East Asia, including mainland China, Singapore and Macau.  Gammon’s business interests cover design, project management and construction services for buildings, civil engineering, foundations, electrical and mechanical and interior refurbishments and fit out.  Gammon also has comprehensive support services including a large fleet of plant and equipment, a concrete batching business serving Hong Kong and Macau and a steel fabrication service based out of Hong Kong and Dongguan, mainland China. Gammon has operated in mainland China since 1980, completing nearly 100 projects in some 16 provinces and cities.  We are one of the first foreign companies to take the major step of establishing a Wholly Foreign Owned Construction Enterprise in China. 

As a leading regional construction company, we fully support the need for our industry to embrace sustainability.  We believe that we should be proactive and not reactive, and that such an approach generates a win-win situation.  Embracing sustainability not only enables us to manage and minimise the economic, social and environmental impacts we have, but it also makes simple business sense – it enables the better management of risks, improves efficiencies, enables cost savings and enhances brand value. 

 

To Gammon, our commitment to sustainability is not just about the traditional ‘triple bottom line’ of economy, social and environment, but also involves a fourth facet of Health and Safety, which is a critical component in our business and the wider industry.  Gammon’s commitment to sustainability is therefore a commitment to the ‘quadruple bottom line’.

 

 

We have established health and safety management systems, certified to OHSAS 18001, for our different operating units and businesses.  Whilst the basis of these systems is common across our business, localized variation is necessary so that we ensure we are reacting to local variations and requirements.  Nonetheless, the overriding aim is to ensure that health and safety matters arising from our operations and activities can be tackled in an effective and systematical way. 

 

Gammon is fully committed to creating a safe and healthy working environment, and seeks to positively enhance the safety culture of personnel engaged in the construction industry.  We attach the highest priority to the health and safety of our workforce, subcontractors, customers and the public.  Gammon's approach is to go way beyond compliance and to achieve a zero accident vision.  We implement a comprehensive range of safety initiatives and regularly monitor our performance against a series of indicators and targets relating to incidents, accidents and near misses.  All of our activities are subject to safety risk assessments and we deploy registered safety personnel on all of our sites.  Education is critical and we promote safe working practices and provide professional advice and training.

 

Firstly, in mainland China the regulatory environment for health and safety in construction is very complicated and comprehensive, where many authorities and bodies have an influence.  It therefore takes time for staff and workers to understand and implement the regulatory requirements, and training becomes a key focus area. 

 

Secondly, the education and training of the workforce represents a significant challenge we face.  Migrant workers from rural areas typically comprise the majority of the construction workforce, and therefore given their background, they are often unfamiliar with the risks and hazards at a construction site.  Levels of literacy, compliance with the demands of their immediate supervisors, cultural differences and a transient workforce are some of the problems that we face, but are ones we must nevertheless take responsibility for.  We have invested in trying to understand safety behaviour and the safety culture of personnel working on our projects in order to examine the workers’ values, behaviour and attitudes towards safety.  By understanding why people behave the way they do when it comes to safety, we can further define ways in which we can help to reduce risk of injury or people in workplace by targeting problem areas, such as the level of EHS knowledge of supervisors.  

We also rely on subcontractors for a large element of our business, and we will only ever be as good as the performance of our subcontractors.  In order to maintain our consistently high health and safety standards, the training and education of our subcontractors’ staff and managers is very important. 

In 2005, we achieved our lowest, most improved accident rate ever recorded and the highest levels of compliance to Health and Safety regulations, and we have seen continual improvement over many years.  We have reduced our accident incident rate (AIR) by over 50% during the last 4 years, and our 2005 AIR for the Gammon group was 11.4 accidents per 1,000 workers, and for mainland China specifically it was 2.5.  Our AIR compares favourably with benchmark figures, such as the Hong Kong Government produced figures for the Hong Kong construction industry which shows the average AIR in 2005 to be 59.9 accidents per 1,000 workers.

 

However, despite our best efforts and performance, construction remains a high-risk business and we have yet to totally eliminate safety risk exposure.  In 2005, we had fatalities occur on our sites in Hong Kong and Macau due to accidents.  Our responses to these accidents have been swift with immediate investigations and reviews undertaken of both management and equipment to understand the apparent disconnect compared with our improved overall safety performance.  The findings of these investigations are not just focussed on identifying the root-causes of these unfortunate incidents, but address where and how to eliminate similar accidents in future.  We are in the process of further reinforcing the safety message across our business through a series of high-level initiatives that involve all levels of management to demonstrate visible leadership and further improve site practices and accountability.

 

As I have said, the zero accident vision is our driving force and all of our initiatives seek to contribute to realising this vision. 

 

With organizations such as the OS&H Council in Hong Kong and Tsinghua University, Beijing (where we have we have established the Tsinghua University – Gammon Construction Safety Research Centre), we have been undertaking research studies on behavioural-based safety to seek to improve safety awareness and behaviour.  Behavioural-based safety introduces a systematic on-going approach to safety management by observing worker behaviour and safety awareness on site and assessing why workers behave the way they do.  It is a bottom-up approach focusing on front-line workers, supervisors and middle management, wherein critical behaviours are identified and targeted for change. 

 

Although the use and application of BBS in the construction industry remains at a preliminary stage of understanding, one outcome for us has been the establishment of the Area Management Scheme onto all of our construction sites.  This is a scheme whereby appointed individuals, known as Area Managers, are measured and scored on the performance of their respective site based teams for Health, Safety, Environmental and Security (HSES) performance. This is achieved by dividing any given site into clearly identifiable areas in which both the Area Managers and their teams are assigned with the overall responsibilities for the management of HSES.  By bringing accountability to individuals and teams, we are seeing noticeable improvements on our sites.  It also reinforces the message that safety begins with leadership, and the nominated Area Managers become the clear leaders for their areas of responsibility.

 

Another Gammon initiative has been the establishment of Workers’ Registration Centres (WRC), with Hong Kong and Macau being the focus to date.  In addition to their function as a registration facility, these centres provide compulsory half-day practical safety and environment training courses, tailored to the needs of frontline workers.  We have made it compulsory that all workers on our sites, whether direct or subcontract, must attend and pass the WRC course before being allowed onto our sites.  We also acknowledge that in order to maintain consistently high health and safety standards, the training and education of our subcontractors’ managers is a critical component of the sustainable safety mindset, and we offer through our in-house training facility, the Gammon Academy, a full day safety training course targeted at our subcontractors’ senior managers and directors. 

 

Finally, certain activities present higher than usual risks on our construction sites.  Based upon our project work and activities to be undertaken, we are continually reviewing areas where we need to be vigilant and reinforce safety messages and expectations.  An example, our ‘Working at Height Safety Campaign’, was launched in 2005 to enhance and promote working at height safety awareness and to reward our sites, workers and foremen for outstanding performance. 

 

 

The economic benefits to our business from health and safety management are obvious, in that by managing and controlling health and safety, and therefore reducing accidents and injuries, we benefit from increased productivity, less absenteeism, reduced insurance and healthcare premiums and ultimately a better safety record which holds us in good stead for securing future projects.  Good safety means good business.

 

Quite simply, it will be to realise the zero accident vision.