New employee safety risk management

Integration of the New Employee Safety Risk Management Processes... 

The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive discussion of the factors which have the potential to increase safety risks for new employees, and the safety issues which current job incumbents face when new employees arrive. The work is written to provide a research-based understanding of the issues associated with new employee safety risks. As such, students completing courses on occupational health and safety may find this book useful. However, the work will also be useful for managers and practitioners looking for solutions to their new employee accident problems. Recommendations to improve new employee safety are made which can easily be adopted, have relatively little cost, and should easily fit within existing processes. 

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. 

When there is an option in terms of who performs tasks, a key question is who should be performing tasks with an associated safety risk component Without management intervention in this decision process, it is possible that a norm could develop within a work group or set of co-workers where the new employee is asked to complete tasks which other more senior employees find imdesirable. If these undesirable tasks also have a higher safety risk, then the normative behavior of getting the new employee to do these tasks exposes the new employee to unnecessary risk. This is clearly not desirable in terms of new employee safety, as they may in fact be the least capable to undertake the tasks in safe manner. 

The scales and measurement options discussed in this chapter are presented in the order which they might be used to manage new employee safety. Section 9.2 examines measures of new employee safety expectations. Sect. 9.3 examines measures which provide an awareness of helping safety risks, and Sect. 9.4... 

The expected supervision scale has 6 items, and both versions are shown in Table 9.6. Scale items were developed based on the discussion of supervisor behavior required to ensure new employee safety in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.8. At the time of writing, no data on the psychometric properties of this scale had been collected. As noted in Chap. 3, supervision of new employees should be a specific task assigned to supervisors. Furthermore, new employees are likely to expect that supervisors will be there to ensure their safety. As noted in many places in this book, the perception that a system has a component which is there to protect a person from risk can lead to more risk being taken. Thus, it is very important that new employees have a realistic perception of the degree of supervision that they will receive. It is also important to note that employees (job incumbents) are asked to complete this scale—not supervisors. Employees should be able to respond to the items in terms of the experiences they have had with supervision, whereas supervisors may respond in terms of what higher management expect of them, rather than their actual supervision of new employees. 

There is little doubt that a new employee, particularly during their initial period of employment (roughly the first 3 months of employment in a new job), is at an increased risk of having an accident, and their presence in the workplace increases the safety risk for other members of an organization (see Chap. 2 for a review of the research evidence). Thus, the first step in managing new employee safety is for the... 

AU employees (including management) need to be reminded of the safety risks associated with new employees, and the nature of, and reasons for, the implementation of the management strategies used to ensure new employee safety. AU... 

Every person that starts a new job can be classified as a new employee. This is true, regardless of the nature of their previous employment history. Of course whether a new employee is a school leaver or has many years of previous work experience will have implications for their new employee-associated safety risks. However, previous job experience does not remove all the safety risks associated with being a new employee. In Chap. 3, different types of new employee are defined, and how safety issues vary across the four types of new employee is discussed. Arguably, an organization that understands the specific safety issues that are associated with a new employee will be in a better position to manage that employee s safety. It is also important that new employees understand their own vulnerabilities, and strategies are discussed which allow an organization to help different types of new employee protect themselves from risk. 

Trust plays a central role in safety (Conchie et al. 2006). Studies have shown links between positive safety outcomes, and tmst in management (e.g., DePasquale and Geller 1999 Kath et al. 2010 Luria 2010), and tmst in co-workers (e.g., Tharaldsen et al. 2010). Tmst is also a key aspect of a positive safety culture (Bums et al. 2006), influences safety attitudes (Walker 2013), and influences the effectiveness of risk communication (Conchie and Bums 2008 Twyman et al. 2008). While there are clear safety benefits associated with tmst, safety benefits can also come from distmst (Conchie and Donald 2008), and this is likely to particularly be the case in relation to new employees in their initial period of employment. Tmst can reduce an... 

---