All of us have felt the pressure of a schedule. Pressures are imposed by people, equipment/materials, and the environment. Pressures surface when we are up against a deadline and we are running late, we lack the necessary human and equipment/material resources to accomplish a task on time, we failed to adequately plan the steps of our project, our internal or external clients are unhappy with the way things are going, or Mother Nature just won’t cut us a break.
Stress generated under schedule pressure is a common aspect of essentially all construction sites. Working with a major construction contractor on low-frequency, high-impact incidents prevention, the issue of schedule pressure and its potential effect on safety performance surfaced as a topic worth exploring.