The relationship between employees' perceptions of safety and organizational culture

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Abstract

Problem: With limited resources to help reduce occupational injuries, companies struggle with how to best focus these resources to achieve the greatest reduction in injuries for the optimal cost. Safety culture has been identified as a critical factor that sets the tone for importance of safety within an organization. Method: An employee safety perception survey was conducted, and injury data were collected over a 45-month period from a large ready-mix concrete producer located in the southwest region of the United States. Results: The results of this preliminary study suggest that the reductions in injuries experienced at the company locations was strongly impacted by the positive employee perceptions on several key factors. Management's commitment to safety was the factor with the greatest positive perception by employees taking the survey. Discussion: This study was set up as a pilot project and did not unitize an experimental design. That weakness reduces the strength of these findings but adds to the importance of expanding the pilot project with an appropriate experimental design. Summary: Management leadership has been identified, along with several other factors, to influence employee perceptions of the safety management system. Those perceptions, in turn, appear to influence employee decisions that relate to at-risk behaviors and decisions on the job. Impact on Industry: The results suggest that employee perceptions of the safety system are related to management's commitment to safety, which, in turn, appear to be related to injury rates. Management should focus on how to best leverage these key factors to more positively impact injury rates within their companies.

Introduction

During 1998, more than 9 out of 100 workers in the manufacturing sector experienced an injury at work that required medical attention (National Safety Council [NSC], 1999). According to NSC, accidents and their consequences continue to be a major public health concern. Those in the industry have historically focused efforts on reducing injuries through engineering controls and attending to physical conditions of the work environment. Although critically important, many safety professionals recognize that there are other factors that significantly influence the likelihood of injury to employees.

This study was developed with the following objectives in mind:

  • To examine the use of an employee perception survey as a predictive tool of successful safety results;

  • To identify factors that, when present, suggest a high level of risk-control effectiveness;

  • To examine the use of an employee perception survey as an alternative measure of an effective and successful safety program; and

  • To identify general factors that influence employee perceptions of a company's supervisory/management safety process.

The fundamental management process is to allocate available resources to a productive end. The limited resources that managers have to work with are those of time, money, and people. One responsibility of most managers is the safety and health of those employees under their direction. From a practical point of view, management needs to identify how to best allocate resources to ensure the lowest possible number and severity of injuries experienced by employees. In order to conserve resources, managers have to be aware of what resources they do commit to safety and how those resources influence the number and severity of injuries experienced by their employees. Traditional safety management efforts have run the gamut from the inspection era, the OSHA era, to the Accountability and the Human era (Petersen, 1988). More recent data suggest that it is the management system that has the most significant impact on injury rates (Petersen, 2000). Efforts that focus on several key management processes such as OSHA's Voluntary Protection Plan have demonstrated that systematic management of safety and health processes result in lower injury rates and usually higher productivity. O'Toole (1999), in a study of employee participation at eight manufacturing sites, found that merely providing and encouraging employees to participate in the safety process resulted in lower incidence of OSHA Lost Time Injuries and lower severity rates over time.

Section snippets

About the study

This study was conducted using a modified version of the Minnesota Perception Survey, which was originally developed by Bailey and Peterson for the railroad industry. The survey used in this project was developed and validated by Dr. Brooks Carder for use in a number of different manufacturing industries. The subject company is a mining and construction products company headquartered in Houston, TX. Like many others, this company struggles with its safety efforts and uses OSHA, MSHA, and the

Literature review

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “culture” as “the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a community or population.” More specifically then, corporate culture is a pattern of beliefs and assumptions shared by members of the organization that operates unconsciously and that defines in a basic, taken-for-granted fashion an organization's view of itself and its environment (Schein,

Theoretical assumptions

The findings of this observational study are based on a comparison of data from written surveys and several in-person interviews. Several key theoretical principles have been applied to the findings.

(1) Accidents are defects in the system and are not simply a result of the carelessness or errors of individuals. To reduce these defects, the system must be analyzed to discover areas for improvement.

(2) The attitudes and perceptions of the employees reveal the vision and values that drive their

Methods

A 41-item safety perception survey was distributed to all employees, including plant office employees. Each item presented the employee with a choice of responding either “yes” or “no.” From the combined responses, a percent positive response rate was computed for each question by dividing the total number of positive responses by the total responses. It consists of those questions and factors that prior research has shown to be valid indicators of the state of the management system. The

Results

To analyze the safety survey responses, the totals for each question were compared and the percent of “positive” responses was computed. This was accomplished by simply adding the number of “yes” responses for each question and dividing by the total responses for that question. For example, Question 1 had a total of 1375 responses, of which 1232 were positive (yes), to equal a 90.8% positive response rate for this question. Each of the questions on the survey has a positive answer, which

Conclusions and recommendations

Due to the absence of an experimental design at this point of the study, it is not possible to infer with statistical certainty that the company's safety culture had a positive impact on safety outcomes (injury rates). There are, however, a number of observations and recommendations that can be made from the existing work.

In general, over the past 2 years, there has been a statistically significant reduction in the OSHA Lost Time Injury Rate at the subject company. It appears from the data that

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