Fonterra longitudinal safety climate measurement

Summary

The Fonterra Co-operative Group engaged RMIT to develop a tool to measure safety climate across construction projects in the company’s capital works program in Australia and New Zealand.

During the course of the project, safety climate measurements were taken throughout the life of ten Fonterra capital works projects. These measurements helped Fonterra, as a client, to manage the health and safety performance of the contractors and subcontractors engaged in the construction program.

Team

• Helen Lingard
• Rita Peihua Zhang

Partners

• Fonterra Co-operative Group

Testimonial

The intent of the Climate Survey activity was to provide a mirror to our Construction Management Teams (CMTs) about their performance and message sending to their project workforce – e.g. are the right messages being sent? Are they being correctly received by the work teams? Rita and Helen have been very supportive with the prompt development of the project specific survey tools and interpretations of results...they have provided an external perspective of scores achieved outside of Fonterra projects and how we may compare. The survey results have also been used to benchmark between projects and set a level of expectation of achievement.

Peer-reviewed papers/outputs

• ZHANG, R. P., PIRZADEH, P., LINGARD, H. & NEVIN, S., (2018), Safety climate as a relative concept: exploring variability and change in a dynamic construction project environment, Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 25(3). pp. 298-316.
  
• ZHANG, R. P., LINGARD, H. & NEVIN, S., (2015), Development and validation of a multilevel safety climate measurement tool in the construction industry, Construction Management and Economics, 33(10), 818-839.