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Safety Culture Assessment
Achieving a Total Safety Culture requires the organization identify the barriers preventing employees and leaders from performing their best. Otherwise, tremendous effort may be lost pursuing initiatives that miss the mark. SPS offers a comprehensive safety culture assessment that measures employees’ perceptions about the overall effectiveness of the organization’s safety culture. Results of the assessment serve a number of functions. They act as a diagnostic tool to target areas warranting attention, and identify barriers to the improvement efforts. The results can also be used as a performance measure to assess the success of ongoing safety improvement efforts, as well as to benchmark performance against other organizations. Finally, the assessment provides an avenue for employee input into safety improvement efforts.
How Can SPS Help?
SPS’s Safety Culture Assessment is comprised of three tools:
- Safety Culture Survey
The Safety Culture Survey measures several different factors: Management, Peer, and Personal Support for Safety, nine safety management systems (e.g., Discipline, Leadership Accountability, Incident Analysis, Rewards & Reinforcement), and the amount of Actively Caring exhibited by organizational personnel. In addition to analyzing the results according to user-defined demographic variables (e.g., department, position, shift), the site’s results are compared with industrial norms, established from previous administrations of the survey. See Safety Culture Survey for more details.
- Focus Group Interviews
The Safety Culture Survey identifies ‘how’ people feel, but not necessarily ‘why.’ Following the survey, a representative sample of personnel are interviewed. These interviews fill in the gaps of the survey data. Questions are asked to try to gain better insight into why the organization (or department or team) had unfavorable perceptions about certain issues.
- Safety Management Systems’ Maturity Path
Organizations rely on a number of processes and procedures to manage risk and thereby decrease incidents and injuries. These generally include systems such as safety rules and procedures, safety training, hazard identification and correction, discipline, incident reporting and analysis, safety communications, safety suggestions, and rewards and recognition. Each safety management system has an important contribution to make in terms of not only improving workplace safety, but also positively impacting an organization’s safety culture. At best, when the system is poorly designed or operating ineffectively, its ability to affect beneficial change is compromised. At worst, a poorly designed, badly implemented, or ill-functioning system can actually have a destructive influence on an organization’s overall safety culture. To assess these systems in more detail, SPS uses an assessment tool comprised of a set of “Maturity Paths” to assess the systems’ ongoing influence on the organization’s safety culture.
Working with a representative team from the organization, SPS facilitates a structured exercise to assess perceptions about numerous aspects of the safety management systems (all of which are briefly assessed in the survey) that most influence employees’ engagement in the safety culture.
Related Links:
SPS offers a variety of services that often begin with a Safety Culture Assessment:
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