Measuring and evaluating safety maturity of construction contractors: Multicriteria decision-making approach

Evaluating the safety maturity of construction contractors before awarding the contract is an effective strategy that many owners have started to implement. Given the importance of workplace safety, awarding the contract to safer contractors can enhance project performance outcomes in terms of safety, quality, cost, and schedule. Safety maturity is one quality of a construction organization encompassing interdependent factors that can be used to evaluate expected safety performance. However, there is no formal decision-making framework available in literature that owners can use to evaluate contractor safety maturity. The present study aims to bridge this gap in safety knowledge by proposing a decision-making framework that can be used to evaluate the safety maturity of construction contractors. Development of the decision-making framework included two tasks. First, an integrative literature review to identify influential safety maturity factors and their potential indicators was performed. The result of the review revealed seven factors (safety leading indicators, safety lagging indicators, safety and supervisory personnel, system maturity and resiliency, preconstruction services, technology and innovation, and safety culture) that influence the safety maturity of construction contractors. Second, the identified factors, and their indicators, were integrated into a formal multicriteria decision-making method, referred to as Choosing by Advantages, to evaluate the safety maturity of five construction contractors on a selected case study project. The proposed framework is expected to provide practical and theoretical directions on how to evaluate contractor safety maturity using relevant evaluation factors and sound decision-making methods.