Safety Perception Survey

More recently, safety people have applied leading, upstream, predictive, activity, preventive or process indicators or metrics to measure safety performance. This family of measures often includes safety audits, behavior-based safety measures, safety perception surveys, safety training, corrective actions completed, reductions in risk and risk factors, identifying safety and ergonomic opportunities, and other measures. Many use leading indicators to do the following ... 

Results of employee safety perception surveys Safety manuals... 

Even for the large organization with significant annual hours worked, in addition to historical data, hazard-specific and qualitative performance measures (safety audits, perception surveys, the incident... 

For example, I then wrote that since 1980, no articles had been published in the magazine Professional Safety that had performance measures or performance measurement in their titles or abstracts. A further search was made using effective and effectiveness as the key phrases. Two articles were found The June 1981 issue of the magazine contained How Do You Know Your Hazard Control Program Is Effective, written by Fred A. Manuele the February 1989 issue included Using Perception Surveys to Assess Safety System Effectiveness by Charles W. Bailey and Dan Petersen. 

Dr. Stephen Simon has attained notable credentials in safety culture improvement. He developed the Simon Open System (S.O.S) Culture Change Model, which is discussed in a chapter titled Achieving The Necessary Change in the book Safety Through Design [p. 37]. It is noteworthy that, in the title of his survey instrument, he includes both the terms perception and culture. It is known as the S.O.S Culture Perception Survey. 

After many years of development and testing, we found that a perception survey of employees and managers in an organization gave us a better prediction of the future of the safety record than any other indicator we tested. We have been using perception surveys for a number of years and found their use to be invaluable in diagnosing what needs to be done to improve safety systems in organizations. 

Bailey, Charles W. and Dan Petersen. Using Perception Surveys to Assess Safety System Effectiveness. Professional Safety. Des Plaines, IL American Society of Safety Engineers, February 1989. 

For a safety program to be effective, the safety climate needs to be supportive of the program. The safety climate includes management, workers, the physical equipment in the workplace, and the interfaces between the people and the environment. Perception surveys can be used to assess the status of the safety climate in the workplace. Key areas that perception surveys can assess include management support for safety and employees attitudes and beliefs about safety. Environmental conditions and interfaces between equipment and workers can be assessed using various system safety techniques. Examples of system safety techniques include root cause analysis and failure modes and effects analysis. 

Describe the uses of perception surveys for the purpose of measuring safety performance. 

Perception Surveys surveys used to measure attitudes toward, and acceptance of, safety and health programs. 

Perception surveys are used to measure attitudes toward and acceptance of safety... 

Likert invented a way to measure climate with a forced choice questionnaire that he administered to employees to find out their perception of how good the company is in the ten areas. He later took the perception survey results and ran correlation studies with things like profitability, return on investment, growth, and other bottom-line figures, invariably coming up with extremely high positive correlation. Apparently, climate determines results [3,4]. We will discuss employee safety perception and how it will affect the operation in more detail in Chapter 17. 

The process to assess the safety culture is to determine the collective attitudes (perception) about safety. (Safety perception surveys are discussed in Chapter 17.) Confidential interviews are conducted with all levels of employees and management (see the discussion of independent reviews in Chapter 17). A strategic action plan model is developed where a new course is charted for instilling safety into the organization. The point is to design a new culture that is consistent with management and employees perception of the safety objectives [3]. 

Assess. Survey the culture to determine prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to safety and the environment by way of confidential questionnaires (perception survey), interviews (independent review process), focus group meetings, and visits to assess workplace conditions and possible contributions to incidents [4]. We will cover this in more detail in Chapter 17. 

As we have discussed, there are many tools that can be used to evaluate any workplace independent review, employee safety perception survey, document (records) review, workplace evaluations, self-assessments, job hazard analysis, employee interviews, etc. These are some of the basic tools for an evaluation of the workplace. 

Collect and review background information of facihty Results/action plan of safety perception survey Results/action plan of self-assessment... 

Employee perceptions can provide other useful information. An employee s opinion of how easy it is to report a hazard and get a response will tell you a lot about how well the hazard reporting system is working. If employees indicate that the system for enforcing safety rules and safe work practices is inconsistent or confusing, you will know that the system needs improvement [2]. We will discuss safety perception surveys later in this chapter. 

Figure 17-9 Sample safety perception survey results.

Sample Safety Perception Survey Form and Questions... 

Perception surveys have also been used to provide measurements of the quality of safety management systems in place. Through an interview system or the completion of surveys, they provide management with a picture of what employees at various levels of responsibility think about the management of safety in the organization. Perception surveys are outcome surveys in that the perceptions people have of how safety is managed derive from their observations of what got done or didn t get done with respect to the safety system elements covered in the interview or questionnaire process. 

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