Respect for people: looking at KPI’s through ‘younger eyes’!

Movement for Innovation (M4I) is partly aimed at delivering targets set by the Egan (1998) report. An initiative under this programme is the ‘Respect for People’ (RFP) working group. This body published its first formal report entitled: A Commitment to People: ‘Our Biggest Asset’ (2000), and challenged construction to respect its workforce. Failure to do so will result in firms being unable to recruit and retain the best talent in the workforce – currently a 'hot topic' in attracting school-leavers into the construction trades. Construction is thought to have harsh conditions of safety and welfare, with poor prospects - ideas that actively discourage many school-leavers. To combat this ‘image’ problem, the RFP Working Group are piloting a toolkit which can be used to measure and monitor safety and welfare in order to benchmark their performance against industry best practice. This paper uses an adapted version of this toolkit. Building apprentices in Scottish Further Education Colleges were asked their opinions on ‘site life’ and to complete a questionnaire. The results provide an insight into current thinking and expectations of the 'future' of trade apprentices today. The findings are significant to groups needing input from construction's youth (Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and M4I). Additionally this paper is of value to academics interested in human aspects and trends in UK construction.