Construction safety clutter reduces effectiveness of safety systems, research finds

Construction safety systems have accumulated layers of procedures, paperwork and meetings that consume time and attention without improving on-site safety, according to new research that offers the first structured framework for identifying and removing this waste.

The study found that serious injuries and fatalities in North American construction have plateaued despite decades of investment in safety management. A significant reason, researchers concluded, was that safety efforts had grown without a matching gain in actual worker protection. The result was a phenomenon the authors termed “safety clutter”: waste embedded within safety activities that, as implemented, absorbed resources from the work that genuinely reduced risk.

Clutter, the research made clear, was not simply “too much safety.” The key finding was that clutter was an attribute of how a safety activity was carried out, not a label for the activity itself. A pre-job briefing, an inspection or a permit process was not inherently clutter; clutter resided in the specific features of how that activity was designed, timed, delivered or used. The same activity could add genuine value in one organisation and function as waste in another.

The research was conducted by Yaqoob Raheemy, Matthew R. Hallowell, Helen Lingard and Fred Sherratt of the Construction Safety Research Alliance at the University of Colorado Boulder and RMIT University. The paper, Safety clutter: An attribute-based conceptualisation and taxonomy for diagnosis, was published in the Journal of Safety Research. 

The researchers drew on three expert focus groups involving 29 construction safety professionals with a combined 544 years of industry experience, and rapid ethnographic fieldwork (that is, close observation of workers in their actual environment) across 11 active construction sites totalling approximately 200 hours of observation. Thematic analysis was used to build and refine the taxonomy, with findings from both methods compared to test consistency and sharpen definitions.

Participants across the study described a consistent pattern: safety work was draining the very attention and field presence that practitioners associated with real protection. One electrician in the study put it plainly: “I do a lot of paper rather than focusing on my actual work… Personally for me, I do not believe any of these help us be safe.” A field leader described the same trade-off operationally: “I waste a lot of time, and it does not let me be onsite.”

The taxonomy the researchers developed separated clutter into two broad forms. The first, conditional clutter, covered safety efforts that had become wasteful because of their implementation, suggesting they could be redesigned or improved. The second, pure clutter, covered effort that was inherently low in value, regardless of how it was delivered.

Within conditional clutter, the researchers identified three families. Excessive clutter was described as safety work that was overcomplicated, overdone, or repetitive; one participant reported spending more than 90 minutes each morning completing multiple overlapping forms before work could begin. Irrelevant clutter arose when safety activities were directed at the wrong people, conducted at the wrong time or in the wrong location, or produced outputs that nobody used.

A supervisor noted that the same crew sat through identical hazard information across three separate meetings on the same day for the same task. Inaccessible clutter occurred when useful safety information was technically available but effectively unreachable, buried in complex systems, or drowned out by low-value content.

Pure clutter took two forms: incorrect practices built on assumptions that the evidence did not support (such as using total recordable injury rates as a reliable indicator of serious injury risk), and obsolete practices that persisted by habit long after the original context had changed. As one safety coordinator observed, “We have this safety policy that is generic and outdated. It is still there, but it does not match what we actually do now.”

The research identified a structural reason for the accumulation of clutter. New requirements were easy to add, particularly after incidents or external pressure, but difficult to remove. Corrective actions following serious events often led to broad, blanket requirements applied well beyond their original context, creating an ongoing burden on work where the relevant risk was not present. One superintendent described the pattern directly: “They just add stuff without actually seeing if it works or not, or if we actually need it.”

For OHS professionals, the research suggests that the question to ask of any safety activity is not whether it should exist, but which specific features are creating load without improving the safety of work.

Teams conducting safety system reviews should examine activities at the feature level: whether steps are overcomplicated or repetitive, whether the right people are involved at the right time and place, whether outputs are actually read and acted upon, and whether any practices persist because they have always been there rather than because they still fit current work.

The researchers were careful to note that the taxonomy did not establish a direct causal link between clutter and serious injuries or fatalities. The implication was about capacity: when safety effort becomes cluttered, attention is consumed by work that does not improve safety, reducing what is available for the planning and control work that matters most around high-risk activities.