Author Archives: Dennis Ryan

10 Reasons Why a Safety Perception Survey Should be Your First Measurement Option

Safety perception surveys are essential safety performance measurement tools. For more than 40 years renowned safety leaders such as Dan Petersen have advocated their use. Many times Petersen has been quoted as saying, “there is no better predictor of safety performance than a safety perception survey”. Surveys reveal information critical to safety improvement that is not revealed by other methods of measurement such as auditing. The purpose of this article is to explain why safety perception surveys should be considered your company’s first safety performance measurement option. Today, incident statistics and safety system audits are the two methods of measurement most commonly used to assess company safety performance. As with all methods of performance measurement, there are pros and cons with respect to their use. For example, incident statistics are not forward looking and therefore not predictive of future safety performance. They are often used to evaluate whether or not a company’s past incident rates warrant future work contracts. This can pressure companies to find creative ways to keep the numbers low. One of the biggest limitations to the system audit measurement approach is that only a few performance indicators such as investigation, inspection, etc. are incorporated into the audit protocols. Research into what really drives safety performance confirms that other indicators of equal or greater importance such as management credibility, employee satisfaction, autonomy, work-life balance, etc. significantly influence safety performance. In spite of all company efforts to improve worker health and safety, the persistent high number of serious incidents and fatalities suggests we still have a great deal of preventive work to do. Given the limitations of the two methods of measurement explained above, it is hard to understand why the safety profession has been so committed to them as primary measures of safety success. Companies recognized as having “best in class” safety systems, all obtain their best improvement information from their employees. Safety perception surveys are generally used to collect this information. This article will help explain what these companies know that others may not. Here are ten key reasons why companies should consider safety perception surveys as a prime measurement option. Safety Perception Surveys Assess Human Factors/Culture In-depth investigations into serious incidents often point to unsupportive health and safety cultures as the root underlying cause of safety system failure. Safety perception surveys can help identify the human factors that adversely affect the corporate safety culture. A strong positive culture is needed in order to support an effective health and safety program. Companies waste a great deal of time and resources attempting to successfully implement traditional safety elements only to fail because the culture of their organization was not supportive. For example, if management do not demonstrate or in fact feel a strong commitment to health and safety, binders of safety policies and posters exclaiming commitment will not change the basic fact that commitment is lacking. This fact will negatively affect all efforts to succeed in implementing a safety program. Safety perception survey and audit processes are complimentary. Typically audits assess what is in place such as are safety meetings being held and safety inspections being conducted. Safety perception surveys assess how effective they are, as perceived by the employees and provide insight into how they might be improved. Certainly there is some overlap between the two types of methods of measurement but the two should be considered both necessary and complimentary. Companies that only audit will identify weakness in safety program elements but will not identify the underlying human factors that work against safety program success. Together, the measurement methods can provide companies with a better picture of what needs to be done to continue to improve. Anonymously, Employees Feel Free to Express Their Opinions During the audit process, many employees feel uneasy about the interviews being lead by co-workers or an external consultant. Because auditors are required to maintain employee confidentiality, they have to be careful what interview information they reveal to management. Auditors cannot risk revealing interview information to management that could ever come back on an interviewee. The interview information they reveal therefore is limited. On the other hand, when employees respond to surveys anonymously, they feel free to express themselves with no fear of reprisal. In this way companies receive employee unconstrained perceptions. Beware of surveys that do not solicit employee comments as there is generally a need to later go back to employees and ask them to justify and validate their question scores. This is an expensive process. When employee comments are collected by survey, there is little need to later interview employees in order to validate their question scores. Surveys Reveal Employee Perceptions and Perceptions are Reality Safety perception surveys identify employee perceptions which are their realities of the workplace’s health and safety culture. Some cynics suggest these perceptions are not important because they can be incorrect. However, incorrect or not, employee perceptions are an employees’ reality and they do influence employee behaviour. For example, if employees believe senior management does not wear proper PPE at the worksites, to them, that belief is their reality. Their perception could be false if company policy allows for PPE exceptions at certain distances from the work. What really matters is that the employee reality will influence them to focus less on wearing PPE as apparently it is not a management priority. Employee perceptions are important and should never be dismissed. Once these perceptions are revealed, companies have an opportunity to later influence or change them. Surveys More Accurately Quantify Employee Responses Audits typically use a less accurate “all-or-none” approach to scoring employee interviews. All-or-none scoring requires the interviewer to interpret the interviewee’s response and then choose between a score of “Yes” or “No” or 0% and 100% positive. At best, the response provides a “guesstimate” of the employees’ response. Surveys typically allow the respondent to respond to questions on a more accurate Likert scoring scale such as the scale below. This method of scoring employee perceptions helps to ensure opportunities for improvement are not lost or concealed by an imprecise method of scoring. It is also important to note that there are surveys that employ all-or-none scoring. Our all-or-none scoring caution also applies to these surveys. Surveys can Reveal Perception Gaps The perception gap between workers, supervisory and management is important to measure. If question scores indicate that there is no gap between scores of all employee groups, strong alignment among them is indicated. If there are large gaps in scoring, misalignment in perceptions is indicated which generally suggests there are communication issues that need to be addressed. Survey Comments can Identify Specific Improvement Opportunities by Location As previously stated, employee survey comments should be collected and assessed. A good survey database should have the ability to protect a respondent’s identity but also reveal where corrective action is warranted (e.g. by department, section, location, etc.) in certain working locations (or other employee group, as discussed below). Employee comments often contain very specific nuggets of preventive information that are uniquely applicable to their area. This gives the company the ability to target specific corrective actions. Survey Comments can Identify Specific Improvement Opportunities by Employee Group A properly constructed survey used in conjunction with a good database, allows for the sorting of the question ratings and comments by a number of parameters such as by position, age, etc. This opens the door for management to engage with workers very specifically on issues identified within specific employee groups. For example, newer employees may express a need to improve the new employee orientation and training program. A proper database will have the ability to select employee comments and question scores by specific employee group such as by new employees. Fear One of the biggest reasons why companies have not conducted a safety perception survey is fear. If your management is afraid of what a safety perception survey may reveal, your company is a prime candidate for using the survey measurement method. Typically it is the management of the company that decides not to conduct a safety perception survey. Their decision may be due to a fear of what they might hear and afraid of what they may later be committed to improving. If this is the reason your management turns down the opportunity to conduct a survey, it is likely your company is one that would benefit most from this measurement approach. Do not let fear dictate the level of safety your company can achieve. Cost Effective Safety perception surveys can be inexpensive to conduct. A do-it-yourself approach is available to companies and that eliminates the need to hire expensive survey consultants. One of the most costly aspects in conducting either an audit or survey is in the collection of employee perceptions. The one on one interview process is painstaking and very expensive. A good survey database allows companies to gather employee perceptions electronically. As many employees can respond at one time as there are computers available. This significantly reduces the costs associated with auditors and/or survey consultants having to gather employee information one employee at a time. Making a Real Difference Most safety professional want to be able to reflect back on their work career and feel they made a difference. They want to be able to say they didn’t just maintain the status quo: they helped make their employer a safer place to work. They want to be able to say they used every tool available to them to help improve safety in their company. The effectiveness of safety programs is really tested when employees are asked to rate them. There is no better test of safety program effectiveness than a safety perception survey that asks employees to rate various aspects of the health and safety program. It is difficult for companies to conduct safety perception surveys on their own because the infrastructure for surveying is not readily available to them. For them, the most available alternative is to hire an expensive survey consultant to help them survey. This is an expense most companies cannot afford. Some of the larger companies such as ESSO and Dupont have developed their own survey infrastructure that allows them to conduct surveys economically in-house. The survey infrastructure needed is similar to what has already been provided for conducting system audits. Training is needed on how to conduct surveys and to certify survey administrators. A database is needed to share with companies enabling them to collect, manage and report out the data. Governments, safety associations, insurance companies and similar organizations have not adopted or made the survey infrastructure available to companies that would like to benefit from surveying. Compass Health & Safety Ltd. has developed this infrastructure and would gladly share it. Safety perception surveys are an underutilized method of safety performance measurement. Surveys are complimentary to other methods of safety measurement such as auditing. Best-in-class companies conduct safety perception surveys for a good reason. They are on to a measurement approach that many companies have not yet had the opportunity to benefit from. They realize that they cannot succeed in safety without first engaging with their employees. They value their employee survey responses and that is why they are considered best in class. Dennis Ryan is the President of Compass Health & Safety Ltd Let's block ads! (Why?)

Getting Value Out of Your Hazard Assessment Process

I don't know how many audits I have conducted over the last 20 years, but I know it is in the hundreds. One of the areas that I have found hardest to assess as an auditor is the hazard assessment process. It costs companies hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year to comply with this government and/or audit requirement and they fail to take advantage of the potential value hidden in the hazard assessment documents. This is unfortunate.Consider the amount of work that goes systematically into assessing every job and task in a company, then reviewing the assessments with employees and updating the documents as necessary. Then, multiply this by the number of companies participating in this assessment requirement, and you are looking at an incredible amount of human effort that goes into the formal assessment of hazards.Sadly, many companies do not benefit from all the work that has gone into creating these. More often than not, when I request hazard assessment documents for review, I first have to blow the dust off the assessment binder. If you have a binder of hazard assessment documents that have been completed more to show to your auditor to review and score, you are missing a great opportunity to eliminate employee hazards.There essentially are two types of assessments commonly used. There is the type of assessment legislation employees are required to complete just prior to carrying out a job. This often is called a pre-job assessment. Then there is the general assessment that is created on an employee’s position or job/task. Recognizing there are a lot of similarities between the two types, this article examines both types of assessments separately.Pre-Job Hazard AssessmentFirst let’s look at pre-job hazard assessments. In many parts of the world, workers are required by legislation to complete a pre-job hazard assessment before commencing work. Personally, I think the introduction of the legislation to formally pre-assess job hazards is a long overdue requirement. Critics of this assessment process will tell you that workers already are informally assessing their tasks before they commence work and question why we would want to duplicate their informal assessment with a formal one. The reality is, and incident statistics back this up, many workers do not conduct informal assessments, at least not good ones. Other arguments I have heard against the use of the assessment documents is that the assessment only requires employees to check off a bunch of check boxes and once completed, they get little real benefit from the document. I’ve reviewed many of these documents and generally find the assessment forms do a pretty good job of covering off routine repetitive work but do a poor job of challenging employees to assess the new hazards of their ever changing work environment.When asked what they think of the company assessment process, many of the employees I’ve interviewed respond negatively. I maintain it generally is the only the employees creating poor quality assessments that have poor perceptions of the process. And, if the company accepts poor quality assessments, that is what they will get. If you have been experiencing some negative feedback on your assessment process, you should be looking for ways to improve the quality of the assessments. The following tips will help you do just that:Make sure all assessments are in fact being completed before the work is carried out. As an auditor, I have discovered some workers in the lunch room completing the assessments before they get to the jobsite. Others I’ve discovered completing them in their trucks after the job has been completed. Clearly, these employees view the process as just another wasteful management requirement that stands in the way of getting the work done. I don’t know of any worker that could see benefit in an assessment completed on route to the job site or after the work was carried out. This issue is easily solved by supervisors conducting frequent checks for completed assessments to ensure they have been completed on site before commencing work.Assess hazard assessments for quality and let employees know if they are meeting quality expectations. If the assessments you are reviewing are littered with phrases like “be careful”, “be aware”, “be safe”, “keep mind on task”, “wear appropriate PPE”, they may be missing the opportunity to provide quality preventive direction in the assessment. Show employees examples of assessments that meet the quality expectations. Show them your completed assessment or, with permission, the completed assessments of peers whose assessments meet quality expectations.Recognize employees for completing quality hazard assessments. There are many methods one can use to recognize employees from a simple pat on the back to handing out movie passes to those employees whose assessments meet the quality standards. Negative consequences should be administered to employees not meeting expectations or not completing the assessments.Design the assessment document so that it is easy to complete but be sure the form requires workers to think and document all potential hazards. In an effort to make the assessment process easier for workers to complete, some companies have created assessment forms that do not challenged the worker to identify hazards of a changing work environment. The result is assessments that are the same for every work site. They may catch routine task hazards common to all sites but miss other new hazards unique to a changing work environment. The result is predictable, unrecognized hazards will result in an incident.Pre-job hazard assessments are an excellent preventive tool that employees can use to assess their work and work site hazards before the work is carried out. Make sure your company is getting all of the potential benefits out this process. Demand high quality assessments from your employees.General Hazard AssessmentsThe requirement to complete general hazard assessments commonly is found in many basic management system audit tools. Fifty years ago, few people had heard of these assessments.  Safe work procedures were supposed to cover off all health and safety hazards of the tasks. General assessments are the assessments of employee positions, tasks and hazards. They typically have a risk quantification component and require a risk rating for every identified task hazard.Before your company can benefit from the general assessment documents that your people so painstakingly create, you need to first make sure that the assessments are quality documents. Assess them for quality through the following actions:Remove vague phrases such as “be aware” or “be careful.” Add words describing specifically how hazards will be controlled. Don't state wear "appropriate PPE." State specifically what PPE is required to safely carry out the task.Ensure the assessments evaluate each task individually and each hazard individually. Do not accept assessments that group hazards and controls. When hazards are grouped, it is impossible to assess the risk to the group. In addition, the corrective actions identified to control the group hazards are not specific enough to effectively eliminate the hazards.Ensure that every hazard corrective action not completed is assigned for action and dates identified for completion.  Monitor and hold employees accountable for completion. Management pays a stiff price for inaction as they lose credibility and trust of their workers.All health and safety documents should be created for the benefit of the company. No document should be created to simply meet audit protocol requirements. Here are some suggestions on how to benefit from quality hazard assessments:Employee OrientationNew employees should have the opportunity to review all assessment documents relative to their work. This is an excellent way to help a new employee get orientated to their job tasks and hazards.Work ProceduresUse hazard assessments to update work procedures and practices. If the assessment documents are updated regularly, there often is new preventive information that also should be updated into the procedures. Employees typically refer directly to a procedure for work direction — not the assessment document. This will result in procedures that are up to date and reflect all hazard assessment information. One could argue the assessment and procedure documents should be one document. I have clients that had great success in merging the two documents.TrainingTraining opportunities frequently are identified in the corrective action section of the hazard assessment. Make sure these opportunities are incorporated into future employee training requirements. This will help ensure your employees are 100 per cent prepared to safely do the work they may be required to do.From this auditor’s perspective, success in health and safety has a great deal to do with quality of the documents. I have seen a lot of companies score high on some audit protocols because they have met document requirements yet interviews suggest they are not safe companies to work for. If one doesn’t ensure the assessment documents are of high quality, employees will not value them. If the assessments are not valued, they will not be used for other preventive purposes such as to identify training needs and improve work procedures. Good quality assessments play a central role in any incident prevention program.