Construction Workers’ Situational Awareness: An Overlooked Perspective

The construction industry is claimed to suffer from low productivity often caused by its complex, individualistic and unstructured nature. The construction workers’ situational awareness (SA) is an insufficiently investigated and overlooked perspective in current project and production management literature to increase productivity in construction projects. This paper discusses the role of construction workers in planning and control of production and the possible impact of SA for on-site processes integrating knowledge and expertise from construction workers. The paper reviews the literature concerning construction workers’ on-site situation, integration in production planning and control processes and the possibilities for empowering workers with SA. Providing real-time situational data can empower workers to make better decisions based on accurate, transparent, structured and trustworthy data. It is concluded that a better understanding and availability of the project information and progress can free up workers' workload, to focus their capacity on the task delivery. This will ultimately lead to a boost in productivity on-site. Furthermore, the paper opens avenue for further research and how to capture the current state of on-site SA of construction workers through a methodical approach including quantitative and qualitative methods.