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Climate Change! Measuring the Safety Climate in Your Organization

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by Whitney Martin

Russ Lazzell had been with FreightCar America, Inc. less than 6 months when he decided to do an Employee Safety Perception Survey. He was the first Director of Safety the company had hired (previously, safety was managed by each individual facility) and he could see right away that it was going to be an uphill battle. During the first six months of 2012, the company was at a 13.2% recordable incident rate. During the last six months of that year—after conducting the Safety Perception Survey—they were down to a 4.5% rate. Mr. Lazzell feels the survey played a key role in this success by:

  • Giving employees more ownership in the safety program
  • Giving him ammunition to go to company leadership with, to gain their support and commitment to the safety initiatives he was proposing
  • And, by validating his thoughts on what needed to change, and helping him prioritize his plan of attack.

What is a Safety Perception Survey?

Perception SurveyA safety perception survey (SPS) is designed to measures the safety culture in an organization. The term “safety culture” was first used in reference to the Chernobyl disaster, and later in the context of the Challenger and Columbia shuttle explosions, the King’s Cross underground fire in London, and the Continental 2574 crash in 1991. The Advisory Committee on Safety in Nuclear Installations (ACSNI) defined the term as “The product of individual and group values, attitudes, beliefs, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management.”

It is a pretty powerful statement to say that disasters such as Chernobyl and The Challenger explosion were not primarily due to a system failure or a freak human error—they were primarily caused by an underlying pattern of values, attitudes, and beliefs that demonstrated an overall lack of commitment to safety.  A SPS measures employee values, beliefs, and attitudes that drive behavior. It is a proactive measure of safety that allows you to identify the state of safety within the workplace without having to wait for the system to fail.

Why Conduct a Safety Perception Survey?

First, what you measure send a message (both internally and externally) about what you think is important. In most organizations, the C-Suite measures things like profit, market share, and customer satisfaction: measures of success. In safety, however, we most often rely on lagging indicators such as accidents and lost time. These are measures of failure and are fraught with issues. The famous safety consultant Dan Peterson once said, “of course you can use frequency-severity figures to measure your firm’s safety program, as long as you realize that in almost all instances these figures are absolutely worthless.” Conducting a SPS sends a message (to employees, as well as shareholders, customers, regulatory agencies, and insurance carriers) that your company is committed to proactively measuring safety success (rather than failure).

Next, conducting a SPS creates alignment and engagement. Do employees buy-in to your safety messages and practices? Do they truly take ownership of their own safety and that of their coworkers? As a result, do they practice safe behavior (even when you’re not looking) because they accurately perceive the risks and actually believe that adhering to your safety program is an effective way to avoid injury? Giving employees an opportunity to provide feedback and have input into your organization’s safety practices is a great way to ensure everyone is on the same page and working for the same team.

And third, conducting a SPS can have a significant bottom-line impact. Not just in terms of reduced workers comp premiums and OSHA fines, but also because the data obtained in the survey allows you to create targeted, strategic, and efficient action plans. This means that interventions are willingly adopted by employees, and that time and money is spent on implementing the initiatives that will have the biggest impact.  Implementing measures to guide work practices, machinery, behaviors, processes, etc., can only go so far in preventing injuries. A strong safety culture is necessary for any of those efforts to flourish.

How They Did It at FreightCar America – An Interview with Russ Lazzell

“We gave the employees an opportunity to write in their own comments. I had never done that before, and it worked out fantastic for us because we had a lot of good comments written in—I believe the percentage was like 70% of the employees had written-in comments. So they weren’t just going through and pencil whipping the actual survey (coloring in the dots) because they had comments on the back.

We set up in group meetings of about 50-60 employees (depending on the size of the shop). We brought them in, we gave them an hour to do the survey. We explained up front what we were doing, why we were doing it, to be very open, very honest in your comments and don’t hold back. There’s no names on this survey, so no one’s going to know who filled the survey out, if you’ve got a comment on there about a specific supervisor or something like that, more than willingly, put it on there because nobody’s going to know who put it on there.”

Read Whitney’s full article and interview here.


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