PBC Today sat down with Kabbe Njie, principal fire & safety engineer at Kier Group, and winner of the CIOB’s Paul Dockerill Award, to discuss his groundbreaking work on cultural safety
Kabbe Mjie was awarded the Paul Dockerill Award last month, being awarded a grant of up to £10,000 to continue work on cultural safety in construction.
In his work, Kabbe created the Building Safety Management and Method (BSM2) and the Resident Culture Code Toolkit to embed trust, accountability, and resident voices into building safety systems.
Below is our interview with Kabbe about his work and what inspired it.
What does cultural safety mean in the context of the built environment, and what kinds of issues can arise when it’s missing from building safety systems?
Cultural safety means creating an environment where safety is not just a technical requirement but a lived value. It must cut both ways: residents, officers, and leaders each have a role in sustaining trust and accountability.
Congruence is difficult to maintain when people are conflicted by competing priorities, pressures, or fears, which is why openness and candour are essential. Cultural safety is about psychological safety, honesty, and respect, so that everyone feels able to speak up and challenge assumptions without fear. When it is missing, organisations can appear compliant on paper but fail in practice: residents are ignored, officers are silenced, leaders avoid accountability, and lessons go unlearned.
That is why I developed the BSM² framework and the Resident Culture Code Toolkit to provide organisations with the structures and tools to make culture visible, measurable, and sustainable.
Can you explain what your BSM² framework does in practice?
BSM², Building Safety Management and Method, is a structured way of translating values into systems and behaviours. In practice, it connects strategy with day-to-day delivery by embedding competence, accountability, and resident engagement across the lifecycle of a building: from design to construction to occupation.
It helps leaders and practitioners uphold their duty of care by ensuring that safety is visible, accountable, and consistent, meeting not just compliance but the public interest test. BSM² is mapped directly against the Community Risk Management Pillars (CRMP): prevent, protect, respond, prepare, engage, and recover, so that housing providers and safety leaders can apply the same interdependent approach used by Fire & Rescue Services, making safety continuous rather than episodic.
The Resident Culture Code Toolkit was co-designed with residents. What did you learn from listening directly to them?
Listening to residents reminded me that safety is not experienced in policies, it is experienced in homes. Residents told us that being listened to is as important as being protected: they want clarity, honesty, and respect. Officers and leaders, in turn, told us that they also need the confidence and space to act with candour.
The challenge is maintaining congruence across all these groups when expectations conflict, but that is what makes cultural safety so valuable. The Toolkit is the human-facing element of BSM². It translates the framework into practical tools: visuals, checklists, and reflective questions that enable residents and professionals to speak the same language about safety and hold one another to account constructively.
It also highlighted something important for the future: many young residents said they had never considered fire or building safety as a career path. By embedding engagement and education into the Toolkit, we can help open pathways into the sector through apprenticeships, training, and role models, creating the pipeline of new talent the industry needs.
When you say “without openness, trust, and accountability, even technically compliant systems can fail,” how does cultural safety fill that gap?
Technical compliance sets the floor, but cultural safety raises the ceiling. Compliance will tell you whether a system meets the letter of the law; cultural safety ensures people actually trust, understand, and use that system. It fills the gap by encouraging transparency, ethical leadership, and professional curiosity, asking not only “are we compliant?” but “are we confident this keeps people safe?”
And it cuts both ways: leaders must model candour and accountability, while residents and officers must feel safe to challenge and question. When congruence breaks down under conflict, culture is the bridge that holds safety together. Ultimately, cultural safety makes reform measurable, repeatable, and scalable, not just aspirational.
How has your personal experience shaped your approach to safety?
My personal experience has been central. I studied while working, starting as a Fire Safety Inspecting Officer and later becoming a Fire Engineer in the Fire and Rescue Service, where I was mentored by some of the best.
Growing up in East and North London, I saw first-hand how vulnerabilities increase risk. I have also felt the impact personally, having lost a cousin to fire and knowing members of my community who were lost in housing fires. Alongside this, I have worked in and observed workplace environments that were, and in some cases still are, demonstrably unsafe.
Those experiences taught me that an unsafe culture cannot typically be relied upon to keep people safe: compliance on paper is not protection in reality. They gave me a sense of duty that goes beyond compliance. Safety is not just a technical discipline, it is a public duty and a matter of candour to act with honesty, integrity, and responsibility. That is why I built BSM² and the Resident Culture Code Toolkit: to turn that duty into practice, and to ensure the reform effort is passed forward to inspire and equip the next generation through competence, culture, and pathways.
The post How important is cultural safety in construction? appeared first on Planning, Building & Construction Today.
