IOSH Annual Conference

Presentation on fast track, mega projects and inexperienced workforce. Making health and safety improvements in North Africa. Presentation described working with construction managers, EHS professionals and frontline workers to manage risk and improve health and safety performance. 

The session examined the impact and benefit of coaching interventions to improve hazard management, construction safety, maintaining progress, people engagement and communication. 

This presentation was based on the Clipper57 Consulting report on the state of safety on North African construction sites. Language barriers and inadequate policy enforcement among an inexperienced workforce were the primary reasons for shortcomings.

On a project in Morocco, Clipper 57 Consulting found method statements that were 14 pages long: “I’ve got 200 farmers that have come in off the field. Some are welders, steel fixers, riggers – they don’t read English and they don’t understand English. How do you think that’s going to work?” He consolidated the documents into one page “to give the interpreter the opportunity to say, ‘This is what you need to do, don’t do this; job done.’”