Productivity-Safety Model: Debunking the Myth of the Productivity-Safety Divide through a Mixed-Reality Residential Roofing Task

Abstract

Distractions theory and general practice have suggested that providing safe physical conditions will reduce task demands and thereby increase workers’ ability to develop highly productive and safe production systems. However, the construction industry has not achieved greater productivity and safety gains despite extensive safety efforts. This study aimed to examine whether the reduced task-demands as a result of safer conditions actually causes fall risks to be underestimated, encourages increased productivity, and changes risk-taking behaviors. To do so, the changes in study participants’ productivity, risk perception (through physiological and subjective measures), risk-taking behavior (through tracking subject’s motion, and localizing their positions and postures), and safety performance (through frequency of near misses) were examined when they were provided with various levels of safety interventions. The findings indicated that the reduced perceived risk and the desire for increased productivity may skew risk analysis and strongly bias workers toward presuming invulnerability when safety interventions are in place. Known as risk compensation cognitive bias, this change in human behavior counteracts the traditional outcomes explained by Hinze’s distractions theory. The empirical evidence from a simulated roofing task helped substantiate the proposed productivity-safety model, which illustrates how safety interventions might become counterproductive because of the risk-compensation bias experienced by workers.