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Fifteen million safe working hours on one site is a huge achievement, Aldar's health and safety leader explains just how it was possible.
The development in Abu Dhabi's Al Raha beach has completed 15 million safe working hours, in a culture where danger has been the norm. However, there is nothing particularly unusual about the workers - they are the usual multi-cultural mix seen across the region's worksites.
This achievement didn't happen by itself, though. Aldar properties' Health and Safety team leader Andrew Broderick explained: "It's a huge education process here. Heath and safety is very much at the start. It's like the UK was ten years ago."
"Then, there was legislation, but no-one to act on it. Here (in Abu Dhabi) it is very much the same. There is legislation, but it isn't yet widely enforced."
"As there was no enforcement agency, I quickly realisedthe way to do it here is to train, and train some more. You have to just keep on educating."
"When I first started I was working for a contractor in Dubai, so I had direct control over it. It was a diverse workforce, with many different languages, but none of them really had any idea what health and safety was."
"In the end I decided that the only way was to educate, so I threw 'toolbox talks' at them day after day."
"I had about eight thousand men working at the time and the worst accident that I had been a broken wrist."
"Now I'm in a developer role, I can set the standards and the policy, so part of that is to keep training and educating."
Broderick quickly found that a diverse workforce, with thousands of men speaking a dozen or more languages presents its own challenges when trying to get your message over.
"You need a multi-cultural training team. Once again I realised I needed an Indian guy, and Arabic guy and so on. I can't speak all those languages, so these people were really important in getting the message across. I put the training package together and they speak to them. There was one guy, who was fantastic, he spoke eight other languages. He was very busy!"
Using methods he had picked up in the UK, Broderick put together a training package for all of the workers. He found that they were motivated by methods that developed markets have become jaded with, such as small gifts and a scale of stars to be worn on the uniform.
"They really respond well to gifts. If you say to a group 'I've got five dirham for the first person to tell me how to put up a ladder safely, you'll see a forest of hands going up."
"They really like being given stars and awards for the more training they've done.
"You have to build relationships with projectors managers, and get them to 'buy in' to health and safety. You can't just go out there shouting you will do this or you will do that, it doesn't work. Using practical examples where there have been accidents in the past can also help."
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