Developing resilience for safety management systems in the building repair and maintenance sector

The repair and maintenance (R&M) of buildings are becoming increasingly important, given the significant growth of existing building stock. The safety performance of R&M works has become alarmingly low. Building R&M works are characterised by aspects such as the need to work in confined workspaces, at a height, in hard-to-access places and in occupied work environments; the changing nature of work tasks and scope; the need to adhere to tight working schedules; and the use of sophisticated technologies, which create a dynamic and complex work arrangement for building R&M workers. Traditional safety management systems (SMSs) have played a key role in reducing safety incidents at workplaces; however, these systems may be insufficient to deal with the varying and unforeseen safety risks emerging because of the inherent complexity associated with building R&M works. The main reason for this problem is that these classical systems stress on minimising uncertainty—as opposed to coping with uncertainty—because they consider safety issues to derive from deviations that must be removed. In contrast, resilience engineering, which is identified as a complementary to the conventional SMS, assists in coping with the uncertainty caused by the complexity in socio-technical systems. Therefore, resilience must be engineered into SMSs to address the safety risks that occur owing to the complex nature of R&M works. To this end, this study aims to develop resilience for the SMSs in building R&M companies. The specific objectives are (1) to identify the dimensions of resilience for SMSs in building R&M companies, (2) to identify the drivers of resilience for SMSs and (3) to examine the impact of resilience for SMSs on the safety performance of building R&M companies. To achieve these research objectives, this study developed 16 research hypotheses based on the existing body of knowledge. A quantitative research approach and a survey research design were employed to test the research hypotheses. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey with building R&M professionals from 145 Australian building R&M contracting companies. Using the analysis results, this study identifies three dimensions of resilience for the SMSs of building R&M companies: people, place and system resilience. This study establishes that resilience for SMSs has a positive impact on the safety performance of building R&M companies.