Corporate Safety Performance Benchmarking in Construction

Extensive research has been conducted to improve construction safety. This has partly contributed to significant safety performance improvement of the U.S. construction industry over the past 20 years. However, the construction industry still accounts for the most fatalities of all U.S. industries. Therefore, it is still a long way to go for the U.S. construction industry to achieve the goal of zero accidents. Since 1990, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) has conducted an annual safety survey concerning its members' overall safety performance. As a whole, CII members experienced substantially better safety performance when compared to the overall U.S. construction industry over the past two decades. This paper presents the results of a recent CII Annual Safety Survey completed by 53 leading construction organization in 2009. Based on these results, a follow-up survey was administered to those companies to investigate the common attributes among those companies in order for other companies to emulate those attributes that likely lead to improved safety performance. This paper facilitates the industry's effort to move toward the zero accident goal by providing new comprehensive benchmarks of safety performance for owners and contractors.