Safety culture is one of those things that gets talked about a lot in construction and delivered inconsistently. Everyone agrees it matters. Fewer sites actually have it. And the sites that do have it produce measurably lower rates of reportable incidents than the ones that talk about it and stop there.
The reason culture is hard to build across a construction site is that the site is populated by contractors from different companies, each with their own inductions, their own supervisors, their own performance metrics and their own commercial pressures. Site-wide safety culture depends on those different populations behaving as if they share a common standard. When they do not, culture becomes a poster on the welfare cabin rather than a set of daily behaviours.
Where a single group is delivering multiple major packages on a scheme, the culture problem simplifies considerably. The scaffolders, roofers, groundworkers and fall protection specialists all sit within the same governance structure. They attend the same safety briefings, follow the same near-miss reporting protocol, work to the same weekly inspection cadence, and answer to the same directors on safety performance.
The behaviours that follow are consistent rather than fragmented. An operative who spots a defect on a scaffold does not have to work out which contractor to escalate to. A near-miss reported by a roofer gets logged against the same system as a near-miss reported by a groundworker. A weekly safety walk produces one report covering all the group’s activities on the site rather than four unrelated ones.
The measurable outcome is a lower reportable-incident rate. The Globe Group’s internal data across the last three years shows a materially lower rate of RIDDOR-reportable incidents on sites where multiple group businesses are delivering than on sites where any of them are delivering as isolated packages alongside third-party contractors. The pattern is consistent across scheme size and complexity.
For principal contractors, that lower incident rate has direct commercial consequences. Fewer incidents mean fewer stoppages, fewer HSE visits, fewer insurance claims, and fewer defensive documentation exercises. Each of those has a cost that does not appear in the safety spreadsheet but appears in the overall scheme cost.
For developers who carry ultimate CDM duty in some procurement structures, the incident rate matters directly. An HSE improvement notice or a serious accident on the developer’s site draws attention that no amount of subsequent PR can offset. Prevention is much cheaper than response.
The mechanism by which group culture works is not mysterious. Shared training. Shared reporting. Shared review of near misses. Shared response to corrective actions. Shared executive attention to safety performance across the group. Each is a small operational discipline. Cumulatively they produce a working environment in which the operatives on the ground understand that safety is not a compliance exercise but the way the group actually runs.
There is also a recruitment and retention effect worth noting. Operatives who work in a strong safety culture stay longer and are more productive than operatives working in a weak one. The staff turnover across the Globe Group’s operational businesses is materially lower than the industry average, and that continuity itself contributes to the safety outcome.
For developers considering multi-package procurement with the Globe Group, the shared safety culture is one of the underspecified but real reasons the group’s schemes tend to run more predictably than mixed-contractor sites. It is not a marketing claim. It is what the incident data shows.
Talk to the Globe Group To discuss shared safety culture across the group on your scheme on your scheme, contact the Globe Group on 01223 890727 or email enquiries@theglobegroup.co.uk.
