Employee risk profile

Figure 4.1 illustrates the nature of a job s safety risk profile, and what an employee can potentially encounter when they begin a new job. Education, experience, and training can prepare a new employee for normal and known safety risks. However, a number of other factors can add safety risks to a job. Figure 4.1 shows a number of these factors equipment safety issues, task assignment, workload and performance requirements, scheduling and work hours, environmental variance, co-worker behavior, supervision, and employee silence and safety voice. These... 

If exiting employees are not voicing safety concerns, then the organization may not have the necessary knowledge required to prompt corrective action, and the new employee (even those with realistic expectations of the normal safety risk profile for the job type) may be about to enter a job with an unacceptable level of safety risk (beyond those normally associated with the type of work). Thus, new employee safety will be enhanced if a workplace has a safety voicing culture, where employees freely share safety information, and this is supported and reinforced by both management and co-workers. In contrast, a new employee that enters a workplace which has a silence culture, or has employees that want to voice about safety but feel they cannot for some reason, can be exposed to more safety risk than is necessary. 

By identifying the normal and additional (controllable) risk factors associated with a job, an organization can minimize a new employee s exposure to controllable risk factors and reduce their chances of an accident in their initial employment period. Eight aspects of work which can contribute safety risk for a new employee have been discussed. All of the factors are controllable, but admittedly some are more easily dealt with than others. Each of the 8 aspects needs to be considered, and policy put in place to deal with each before a new employee arrives on the job. Table 4.1 shows a job risk profile checklist which could be used to consider each of the 8 risk factors. A key question or questions are proposed for each risk factor, and the far right-hand column of Table 4.1 has a possible course of action which could be taken to eliminate or minimize the risk factor. It is important to note that the 8 factors are particularly important for safety in a new employee s initial period of employment, which is roughly their first 3 months on the job. 

Each approach to profiling a job s safety risk will provide a unique perspective. Furthermore, collectively the data from these assessments will reflect a job s safety risk profile. Chapter 3 discusses how information on a job s safety risks should be included in a job description document (see Fig. 3.1). For any specific job, the safety risk profile assessment can show a range from a normal and expected safety risk level, through to an extreme and unexpected safety risk. That is, while an organization may think that its management systems are controlling a job s safety risks to a normal and expected level, reality maybe very different. Of course, it would be particularly risky to bring a new employee into a job that has safety risks beyond the normal and expected level. 

New employees will come to a workplace with a set of expectations, and some of these will relate to safety. Employees in the workplace will also hold attitudes and expectations about new employees and about organizational processes associated with the arrival of new employees. A new employee induction program can explain to new employees the nature of their expectations and how these are perhaps distorted, and can place them at risk. However, a far better way to deal with the safety risks associated with new employee expectations is to measure expectations and also acquire information from current incumbents and feed the information back to new employees. This way they can understand exactly how their views and their expectations compared to what job incumbents are saying. New employees also need to be informed about all the safety issues associated with the job they are entering and informed about the job s safety risk profile. While much of this information should be readily available, using a safety specific exit survey process may capture additional information which can either be used to correct the issue or used to alter the incoming employee to the issue. 

The employee selection literature is well developed in the area of structured employment interview development (see Hufifcutt 2011 Levashina et al. 2014 for useful reviews and guidelines). The addition of a set of experience-related questions into a stmctured employment interview will provide a much more comprehensive profile of an applicant s experience and also allow for vastly more accurate predictions of their experience-related risk potential. Furthermore, it will give an indication of how long it may take for the individual, if employed, to become an experienced operator an indicator of the extent of supervision and training which might be needed to ensure the new employee s safety. 

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