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This systematically reviewed the evidence around production pressures within the building sector of the construction industry.

Specifically, they explored the causes of production pressure, its effects on construction activities, and a review of strategies to minimise its causes and effects.

37 studies were included.

Note that the findings themselves won’t be much of a surprise to anybody, but it’s nice to have a decent synthesis of the evidence here.

Results:

Overall a range of factors were found to be associated with production pressures. These were categorised broadly under:

• Construction scheduling
  • Unrealistic time constraints, setting aggressive and forever changing schedules, project deadlines
• Management
  • Management lack of understanding, valuing production over safety, intensification of work pressure
• Construction rework
  • Rework facilitating aggressive scheduling, unanticipated and unscheduled work
• Other reasons
  • Deficiencies in project management and planning, fatigue, competitive tendering, setting unrealistic costs and durations

Each category has multiple factors within it, with different drivers being responsible.

The authors discuss how these categories and factors can create production pressures. Management influence is covered in particular, with how management practices can adversely affect construction safety via production pressures.

Research suggests that managers may not always realise the negative effect they have with setting project deadlines and the like, where it’s said “most managers are unaware of the adverse effects that their practices can have on projects, and subsequently, place excessive pressures on their employees to place productivity ahead of safety” (p7). Interestingly, it’s said managers may accelerate the project schedule as they think it’s fair to workers, as workers may get to “enjoy the benefits of completing the work early” (p7). The reality, however, may be far from enjoyment for workers.

It’s said that although several causes of production pressures exist within construction, each stem from essentially the same factor: that being the labour-intensive and time-sensitive nature of construction. Moreover, another key factor is that the perception of success within the building sector is driven largely by the project being delivered within time and budget constraints and thus explaining why “aggressive and forever changing time constraints are continuously integrated into construction schedules, in spite of this causing a profusion of production pressures” (p11).

Tight construction schedules is a leading factor in this sector as well. Construction schedules can impose “unrealistic time constraints and time pressure in projects”, which is then passed on to workers. Some research suggested that approximately 1 in 10 construction accidents had a strong basis in scheduling problems.

Effects of production pressures

A range of negative effects of production pressures have been documented. These have been listed under five categories:

• Stress in employees
• Reduced craftsmanship
• Increased incidents
• Employee’s safety behaviours
• Employee’s perceptions

These factors are discussed in the paper; I’ll just focus on a few points. It’s said throughout the literature that the most significant effects of production pressures on construction are the reduced craftsmanship and changes to stress in employees. For craftsmanship, when these excessive pressures are placed on workers there is a notable reduction in quality of work, appropriately safe working practices and environments, and necessary trade-offs. Another trade-off comes in the form of innovation [NB although innovation in workarounds is likely to increase].

Quality and craftmanship reductions increases the likelihood of quality issues, therefore requiring rework. However, rework further increases project delays and hinders the project’s ability to deliver on the intended timeframe and therefore creates a vicious circle.

For stress, it’s said to “[incorporate] the most substantial ramifications on the ability of employees to successfully complete their activities” (p12). Stress and anxiety leads to reductions in capabilities and productivity.

Too much stress is said to be deleterious to project and worker outcomes, but so too is too little stress and arousal. Some research discussed about trying to find an ideal amount of production pressure, e.g. things like stretch goals, to keep more “optimum” and efficient production levels.

Mitigation strategies

The authors then review the literature around what mitigation strategies may be effective for scaling back production pressures. They grouped these under five main categories, being:

• Scheduling categories
  • Eg, realistic and attainable schedules, short-cycle schedules
• Leadership-based strategies
  • Eg, leadership techniques to reduce production pressures etc
• Communication strategies
  • Eg, Promoting onsite safety comms, leader-based verbal safety comms
• Motivation strategies
  • Eg, Providing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to employees
• Other strategies
  • Eg, Monitoring of pressures on employees

Most of these strategies were pretty obvious stuff and except for a few key things like scheduling, management influences, monitoring pressures, and relaxing aggressive tendering etc. (which is easier said than done), personally I found many of the other strategies to be pretty uninspiring and individual-focused (eg motivation…yawn…as if people didn’t care enough already, but that’s my own system focus bias).

In concluding the paper, they reiterate a few key points. One is that production pressures are “initially generated by aggressive and unrealistic scheduling and ineffective management”, which were found to be the primary causal factors for production pressures throughout the literature review.

Once production pressures ramp up, a multitude of direct negative effects occur including decreases in time per activity, and increased stress, perceived workload and aggressive scheduling.

It’s noted that production pressures may not entirely be avoided and an appropriate level of production pressures should be regulated to minimise stress and loss of quality and craftmanship but maximising arousal and efficiency to an optimum/acceptable level.

Authors: Neale, J. and Gurmu, A., 2021, Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1108/JEDT-12-2020-0529

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-pressures-building-sector-construction-ben-hutchinson