Employee involvement approach

Cultural differences may have a strong influence on the approach you apply to PSM system design and to installation of the systems. In some countries (e.g., Japan) it is expected that the design process will be a participatory one, and attempts to simply install a system that had been designed elsewhere would be doomed to failure. In other countries (e.g., India), the norm is highly directive management within plants, and attempts at employee involvement in system design would be unlikely to work. 

According to the person-oriented simulation approach, the definition of the characteristics of employees is of particular importance. At the same time, an attempt is made to model persons as realistically as possible. This includes the employees characteristics and abilities that have an influence on the allocation of persons to the various activities, the execution times for the activities, and the work quality achieved in the activities. Therefore, the employees involved in the process, along with their behavior, characteristics, and capabilities, are implemented in the Person Net. 

Organizational motivational practices will influence employee safety behavior. Research has demonstrated that organizations that exercise humanistic management approaches have better safety performance (Cohen 1977 Smith et al. 1978 Qeveland et al. 1979). These approaches are sensitive to employee needs and thus encourage employee involvement. Such involvement leads to greater awareness and higher motivation levels conducive to proper employee behavior. Organizations that use... 

Facilitates benchmarking, drives continuous improvement, encourages employees involvement and ownership, provides visibility in direction, raises understanding and awareness of quality related issues, develops a common approach to continuous improvement across the company. 

All employees within the woikplace need to know what the safety and health performance expectations are. Everyone likes to have a clear explanation of what is expected of them. Employees have a basic need to be involved in decisions affecting themselves, and in solving safety and health problems within their workplace. Research has shown that employee involvement is critical to the success of any motivation approach. 

Feedback of the results of the opinion survey, to all personnel, provides an opportunity to sow the seed of commitment to a behaviour-based approach to quality improvement. It also signals management commitment to the importance placed on quality and the need for quality improvement, and provides a forum in which to exchange suggestions and ideas. In essence, it can facilitate the process of employee involvement and empowerment (McAfee and Wirm, 1989). 

The most efficient approach in developing any safety management system is to just listen to what employees have to say. This is the most direct way you can learn about the effectiveness of your safety management system. However, this approach can be difficult for various levels of management who have not had the opportunity to experience the true meaning of employee involvement. The culture of the organization may have a value system that reduces or prevents direct involvement of employees. The leadership team may... 

Use of ad hoc JHA teams can promote a more efficient process and ensure that a variety of perspectives and opinions are considered. Using multiple teams allows quicker development of JHAs. This approach spreads the time requirements through the organization and allows for more employee involvement More involvement spreads job hazard information through the organization s networks. Refer to Chapter 3, Analyzing and Using Your Network . 

In each of the cases described below, the companies had previously used the elements of traditional safety programs. In one example of improvement, on changing in 1980 to a behavioral approach, a major U.S. drilling company reduced its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordable injury rate by 48 percent and moved from the industry average to being one of the industry s top five safety performers. This improvement was achieved through a management-driven behavioral approach even without the levels of employee involvement typical of current implementation efforts (Fig. 1.1). 

In an effort to promote safety and fight such complacency, many organizations establish initiatives to get employees involved in safety improvement, often using the same approaches taken in their quality improvement efforts. A natural outgrowth of these efforts is the involvement of employees in teams that work on improving safety. Such teams are directed to identify safety problems as well as develop solutions for them. 

This edition also includes eight new case studies. The new case studies show the long-term effectiveness of a behavioral approach (Chapter 24), illustrate the effectiveness of a self-observation process (Chapter 25), and document the effectiveness of behavioral safety in smaller organizations (Chapter 26). Finally, an invited chapter from Alicia Alevero and John Austin presents their research that demonstrates the positive impact that conducting observations has on the observer] This research on what they have entitled the observer effect is important because it documents the value of getting employees involved in conducting safety observations. I am excited to be able to include a summary of their research in Chapter 27. 

Several factors were discussed in this chapter that affect whether employees react to workplace hazards with alarm, apathy, or something in between. Taken together, these factors shape personal perceptions of risk and illustrate why the job of improving safety is so daunting. This justifies more resources for safety and health programs, as well as intervention plans to motivate continual employee involvement. I discuss various intervention approaches in Section 4. But before discussing strategies to fix the problem, we need to understand how stress, distress, and personal attributions contribute to the problem. That is our topic for the next chapter. 

The audit s objective affects both the form and the content of audit. It is our contention that audits are suited to determine point-in-time compliance. It is relatively easy to design an audit to determine point-in-time compliance with a regulation or a standard. It is much more difficult to design an audit process that will reliably help evaluate and improve a process. It is unlikely that a standardized audit could accomplish this. What is required is that the auditor has an understanding of the particular process under study. Based on this understanding, the auditor can then design questions to evaluate the process. We have some limited experience with this approach. It lacks the appeal of standardization and is relatively slow and costly. Moreover, it can succeed only in an atmosphere of trust. If the auditor is to ever find out what is really happening, the employees involved have to be confident that the information they reveal will be used to improve the system rather than to evaluate them. 

Once the job is selected, approach the enqjloyee and explain what you are about to do. The supervisor will need the employee s help in completing the JHA. Without employees involvement there is no learning. Use the blank form as identified in Figure 17-2. Ask the employee to start the job from the beginning and explain what he/she is doing. 

Management should also install a process for quality improvement. Continuous quality improvement will occur only through a defined, planned, documented and systematic approach that involves eveiy employee. 

During the inspection, the inspector should proceed with particular emphasis on the critical points. This system guarantees that the internal quality assurance is oriented to the risks associated with the particular type of production. It is a preventive approach. The employees who identify with the organic objective , who are involved in the process and assume responsibility for it, are more careful, because they understand the sense of quality assurance and do not feel that it is an additional burden, impractical, bothersome, a mere formality and bureaucratic. 

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