Why people don’t speak up about safety issues onsite

In the high-risk, ever-changing construction sector, silence is often a rational survival strategy.

A worker will not report a frayed sling or an unstable scaffold if they fear retribution or feel it would put their job at risk.

It’s why, despite decades spent perfecting safety procedures and protocols, global incident rates have plateaued.

The solution cannot be found in a new safety manual.

To cultivate an environment where accidents are genuinely rare, we must apply the lens of human factors.

Trust as an enabler for safety

Without trust, critical information on where dangers lie can be missed.

But when workers witness that speaking up results in tangible improvements – whether that’s a repaired walkway or better site facilities – their motivation shifts from obligation to ownership. They feel personally invested in safety.

It stops being a mandated checklist and becomes a value that the whole team shares.

This is a key element of the Agile Collaborative Safety Culture (ACSC) Program, which is working with construction sites to drive a shift from a culture of policing to one of commitment.

Turning safety into a daily practice

The program’s three core pillars – trust, respect and care – are embedded in everything it does.

These values are nurtured through tangible action and rigorous structures, such as:

• Anonymous intelligence:

Our philosophy is: "We want the information, not the name."

• No-blame reporting:

Workers are empowered to say "no" when safety is at stake, separating the technical problem from the person involved.

• Executive visibility:

Leadership is a visible act.

We facilitate daily reviews where frontline workers engage directly with the full management spectrum, including engineers, safety officers, and site managers.

Does it work?

The ACSC Program has been working with some of Hong Kong’s most complex mega-projects – ranging from live railway tunnels to the HK$141.5 billion (GBP£13.37 billion) expansion of Hong Kong International Airport.

Over the past 10 years or so (2015-2024, to be precise), sites implementing the program recorded an accident frequency rate of 4.1. The industry average, according to Hong Kong’s Labour Department, is 29.6.

Performance continues to improve. In 2024, the AFR at sites following the program dropped to 0.3 per 1,000 workers – compared to a 25.0 industry average for the year.

Why this approach works – even under pressure

Traditional, authoritative safety management often fails due to human biology.

When a worker feels threatened by a supervisor, the brain's limbic system triggers our fight or flight response, compromising executive function.

Under high stress, the ability to process complex information and recognise hazards is diminished, making the worker more vulnerable to error.

The ACSC Program considers these human factors to nurture psychological safety in the team – creating an environment where workers feel safe being vulnerable, admitting to mistakes and challenging the status quo.

By using anonymous and no-blame reporting, emotion (i.e. fear of repercussions) is removed from the process, allowing critical information to get where it needs to go.

Furthermore, direct access to leaders reinforces that psychological safety is a priority at the highest levels of the project.

Using data and AI to support safety

To make safety a highly reliable practice, we move beyond gut feelings to a data-driven discipline.

The program uses machine-learning analysis from over 1,000 distinct data points, enabling the system to identify subtle dips in site morale or reporting and trigger proactive interventions before they manifest as incidents.

By quantifying the ‘intangibles’, we provide a rigorous, evidence-based foundation for cultural interventions, moving beyond the industry’s traditional reliance on instinct.

What this means for the industry

To spread this methodology, the industry must treat culture and trust as measurable elements managed with the same rigour as traditional KPIs.

This can often require structural and contractual action:

• Tender requirements: major clients must make safety culture a tender-winning criterion, not an optional extra.
• Contractual protection: contracts must include specific clauses protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. Mechanisms like NEC Clause 10.2 (which requires parties to act in a spirit of mutual trust and co-operation) must transition from a legal obligation to a lived value.
• Leadership and competence: we must capture leading indicators – such as near-miss reporting and trust feedback – while investing heavily in leaders’ relationship-building skills.

When institutions like the ICE, the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, the Construction Industry Council, and Hong Kong’s Development Bureau align to champion these practices, trust, respect and care become the industry standard.

Learning from other high-risk sectors

High-risk sectors like aviation, healthcare, and nuclear power learned decades ago that technical excellence alone cannot prevent disasters.

Human behaviour dictates success or failure.

• Aviation: the NASA Safety Reporting System decimated accident rates by normalising anonymous, no-blame reporting.
• Healthcare: learning cultures prioritise system improvement over individual blame, a principle demonstrated at Hong Kong's Shatin Hospital over 30 years ago.
• Technology: Google's Project Aristotle proved that psychological safety is the absolute top predictor of high-performing teams.

The challenge for construction is translating these concepts into our changeable, highly subcontracted environment.

Our work on mega-projects proves this translation is possible.

By combining contractual frameworks like NEC with anonymous reporting and no-blame leadership, we’re successfully adapting these global, cross-sector lessons into daily construction practice.

Safety is so much more than ‘office culture’

Building a high-trust environment amid the immense operational pressures of a major construction site is not a ‘soft’ exercise in office culture. It’s a sophisticated engineering of human behavior.

Ultimately, safety is the definitive indicator of organisational health.

We possess the engineering mastery to design and build the world's most complex structures. The next leap in industry performance demands that we invest in the people who build them with the same rigour we apply to technical specifications.

When the human infrastructure – rooted in psychological safety and mutual respect – is as robust as steel and concrete, world-class performance is no longer an aspiration, it’s an inevitable consequence.