Factors that influence safety climate in construction in Oman

The safety climate on a specific construction project refers to managers‘ and workers‘ shared perceptions of the adequacy of the safety and health programmes and the consistency between the organization‘s espoused safety policies/procedures and the actual conditions at the job site. A mature safety climate and a rich safety culture contribute to achieve a safe workplace. This paper aims to explore and to make explicit some of the key factors / dimensions that have a high influence and need to be considered for the assessment of the maturity level of safety climate. The concept of safety climate is firstly discussed with a review of different safety climate factors from the published literature. The results of the interviews with the construction managers of selected construction companies in Oman that exhibit high level of safety performance are reported. The objective of this research work is to find out which safety climate factors will be relevant to construction organizations in Oman that will need to be considered for assessment and could be helpful to make different plans to achieve the required level of maturity. The results show that Management Commitment, Aligning and Integrating Safety as a Value, Accountability at all Levels, Supervisory Leadership, Empowering and Involving Workers, Improving Communication, and Training at all Levels are some of the key factors that highly influence safety climate in Oman. Since this is the initial finding of the semi structured interview involving six experienced construction professional, representing top management, further research is recommended to be conducted by giving an opportunity to other members of construction team (site supervisors, skill workers and labours) to express their views of safety climate leading factors.