Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

We had an incident on site last week where a 9 tonne dumper rolled over. The driver was OK, he escaped with a broken wrist and collar bone. The initial, unofficial, assessment is that this was a simple case of driver error as it appears that he reversed off of the haul road. However, as often seems to be the case in situations like this, there is always more than meets the eye. It turns out that the supervisor has only just joined the job and was authorised as a ‘competent person’ by the project director just 6 days before the incident. The usual foreman was off on holiday and was not providing the same amount of supervision as is normally applied in the area. (I should stress that this is routine business; if a foreman or supervisor is away on holiday, their workload is often shared between others of the same grade.) Finally, had the dumper driver understood the daily briefing?

Our labour (ground workers, excavator operators, multi-skilled operators etc) tend not to have English as their first language. Of the 19 gangs we have on site, only 3 have a supervisor where English is their first language. Adding to this complexity is the fact that the gangs are not made up of people who speak a common language, the language used on site to communicate is English. But how much does the Romanian ground worker understand the brief given by his Indian supervisor? What about the Pakistani dumper driver receiving instructions over the radio from his Albanian supervisor? Not only are we communicating in a language foreign to everyone, the language that is being used to communicate between them is being delivered by someone else who does not always have a good grasp of English.

This begs 2 questions; firstly, where is the British workforce? A ground worker earns £22/hour and many of them work 11 hours a day for 6 days a week. You do the maths, but this is a lucrative job for an unskilled labourer. The foreman are mainly from a British background, but that won’t be true for much longer if there is no one coming through.

Secondly, and more importantly, should we be adjusting our method of communication to ensure that everyone understands daily briefings? Should we be asking our supervisors to use a translating software so that the brief is input accurately by whoever is giving it and clearly understood by the one receiving it? Surely our responsibility is to ensure that everyone works safely and if we have to make allowances by changing our communication style, then we should be doing it!

Does anyone else have similar challenges? Has anyone already overcome this problem and is already doing briefings using a translating software?