Error undermines construction productivity – but our pilot programme has shown that with the right behaviours and error reduction training, we can crack it, writes Cliff Smith, executive director of the Get It Right Initiative (GIRI)
At a time when construction margins are tight and firms are navigating an especially volatile business environment, every pound counts.
For over a decade at the Get It Right Initiative, a not-for-profit organisation bringing together over 130 construction clients, contractors and consultancies, we have been making the case for reducing the cost of avoidable error on the UK sector – which amounts to up to £25bn each year.
As is so often the case in construction, the answer lies in skills. Error reduction training enables construction professionals to spot, report and address error in a systematic way, rather than accepting it as part of the job.
We’ve been pushing that message since we first established GIRI, but now a recent pilot has allowed us to quantify just how powerful this can be, and to model how it can be rolled out at scale through a train-the-trainer model.
In 2024, four UK firms – Kier, BAM Nuttall, Volker Stevin and Taylor Woodrow – joined GIRI’s Productivity Training Commission. Since then, they have avoided £92.6m in lost value across their projects, equivalent to almost 10% of the value of the schemes being built.
With pressure on the industry to deliver the government’s Infrastructure Pipeline and housebuilding targets, the pilot is landmark evidence of the benefits of error reduction on the sector’s productivity, and that it’s a smart investment for firms looking to protect their bottom line.
Setting out the mission for error reduction training
Addressing the sector’s low productivity has been a driving force behind GIRI’s work over the past decade. The £25bn lost to avoidable error is worth 21% of the overall value of UK construction projects and takes the form of wasted time, materials and costly rework.
But the impact of error extends beyond the balance sheet. Issues like inadequate planning, poor communication or late design changes all impact overall project performance. This ranges from affecting carbon emissions through waste and rework to increasing safety risks.
Against this backdrop, it was important to make senior leaders aware of the true cost of error – and to demonstrate how much can be avoided when people are equipped with the right skills, behaviours and confidence to challenge it. The commission found this to be a key part of getting buy-in.
How the pilot took off
Since 2018, GIRI has been running courses focusing on behavioural training, developed in collaboration with the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and industry partners. The content is shaped by real-world evidence of where knowledge gaps exist among supervisors, managers and leaders, and draws on GIRI’s guidance on the most common causes of error and how to prevent them.
To date, we’ve now trained over 10,000 people. We then developed the GIRI Accredited Training Scheme, which allows employers to train their own trainers, so they can run in-house courses and upskill their own talent and their wider supply chain.
Through the pilot, the four firms became the first construction businesses to take part in this scheme, supported by CITB funding. It has enabled them to train 4,575 delegates in total, across 25 different projects over 26 months.
Project leadership teams completed courses that included tasks like the “Get it wrong exercise”, where they identified the errors that might occur, what action could be taken to prevent them and produced an action plan from this thinking – putting theory into practice on their projects.
From classroom to commercials
Once the programme had concluded, we wanted to evaluate its impact. The most striking outcome was financial: training cut the predicted cost of error on participating projects by around half.
Return on investment was just as compelling. For every £1 spent on training, an estimated cost of £256.48 was avoided, showing that those who prevent problems upstream can gain a competitive advantage. The cost-benefit ratio will only widen further as delegates are redeployed to new projects – taking their new-found skills with them.
As well as cost avoidance, post-pilot surveys revealed improvements in team morale, business reputation and the likelihood of winning repeat work. We know that processes alone can’t eradicate error – the response needs to be a behavioural one.
GIRI has been pushing for a cultural shift around error in the industry more widely – urging construction professionals to have confidence in speaking up about it – and our survey results showed measurable cultural improvements including stronger communication and a greater willingness to press pause when something is wrong. Since the right attitudes are just as important as having the knowledge to address error, these findings were particularly encouraging.
So what next? The Productivity Training Commission has shown the impact of a train-the-trainer model that other firms can adopt. Scaling error reduction across the industry would represent a major step towards boosting productivity and creating financial headroom in an increasingly unpredictable commercial landscape.
The industry has already signalled its support for GIRI to develop further training programmes, including those aimed at addressing error reduction skills at an operative level. The UK construction sector enjoys a strong global reputation – and by systematically reducing avoidable error, it has an opportunity to raise its standards even further.
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