FACTORS AFFECTING WORKERS PRODUCTIVITY IN BUILDING PRODUCTION PROCESS

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study
Several studies related to labor productivity are performed for construction industry in past. Several of them were related to calculating the effect of productivity factors. Measureable calculations about the effects of those factors are required for several purposes, it includes estimation of the construction project, it’s planning and scheduling. However, past study shows that it is tough to calculate such an impact, and at present there are no universally accepted standards to measure factors causing labor productivity loss in construction industry. This lack of methods for measuring effects highlights the need to enhance measureable assessments for the factors affecting productivity in building construction, and this is supposed to be the topic of this research. Achieving better labor productivity requires detailed studies of the actual labor cost. Various labors have different variables affecting their productivity levels. For every project, productivity, cost, quality, and time have been the main concern. Better productivity can be achieved if project management includes the skills of education and training, the work method, personal health, motivational factors, the type of tools, machines, required equipment and materials, personal skills, the workload to be executed, expected work quality, work location, the type of work to be done, and supervisory personnel (Rowlinson and Proctor, 1999). In today’s era, one of the biggest concern for any organization is to improve their productivity, representing the effective and efficient conversion of resources into marketable products and determining business profitability (Wilcox et al., 2000). Consequently, considerable effort has been directed to understand the productivity concept with different approaches taken by researchers, resulting in a wide variety of productivity definitions (Lema and Samson, 1995; Oglesby et al., 2002; Pilcher, 1997).