Perception surveys, safety measurement

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 ... 

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. 

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. 

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. 

The impact of an intervention can be measured by comparing perception surveys given before and after implementation. At one plant, our baseline Safety Culture Survey indicated that secretaries had below-average levels of perceived empowerment, as assessed by the measures of self-efficacy, personal control, and learned optimism described earlier in Chapter 15. A special recognition intervention was devised and later the survey was administered again to measure changes in the five actively caring person states as well as safety perceptions and attitudes. 

For example, a correlation of 0.30 between the results of a safety perception survey and other measures of safety, such as employees frequency of coaching sessions completed or percentages of at-risk behavior per observation period, sounds good until you realize that only 9 percent of the variance in one measurement device could be accounted for by the other (0.30 = 0.09 or 9 percent). In this case, 91 percent of the variance in people s safety perception scores could not be explained by the other estimate of a person s safety. 

There was no explicit assessment of safety culture, in combination with a quantitative evaluation of the HSE environment in the accident reports. Such an assessment could be used to get a collective measure or temperarnre of the priority of safety in the organization, related to best practice . In Itho (2004) there is shown a correlation between the level of safety culture and quantitative incidents/acddents thus safety culture could be used as an indicator of the holes in harriers or the level of erosion of barriers, in combination with quantitative HSE data. A more specific measure tan culture is described by Rundmo (1997) i.e. when an employee in the Norwegian oil and gas industry feels at risk he/she is at risk. A proactive indicator could thus be a workplace survey, measuring risk perceptions or performing a more broadly based assessment of safety culture in combination with other local quantitative indicators such as gas emissions, injuries compared with best practice in the industry. 

By the long term effect we mean the safety performance over a long period of time coupled with prosperity on the basis of measures such as production, service, productivity and quality. Related to safety we would like to asess accidents and successful interventions together with a survey of risk perceptions in the organizations. If there is a problem to measure successful intervention, the level of accidents is the flip side and could be explored. 

Safety climate surveys are well embedded as measures of safety culture in industry and have also been translated and applied in healthcare (Abdullah et al. 2009 Cox and Cheyne 2000 Cox and Cox 1991 Coyle et al. 1995 Flin et al. 2006 Helmreich arid Merritt 1998 Meams et al. 1998, 2003 Modak et al. 2007 Nieva and Sorra 2003 Smits et al. 2008 Sorra and Nieva 2004). Safety climate is regarded as the surface features of the underlying safety culture (Flin et al. 2000). Surveys typically assess workforce perceptions of procedures and behaviours in the work environment that indicate the priority given to safety. 

Safety percephon surveys are an important tool used to ask queshons that employees can answer anonymously and in conhdence. They provide the ability to measure the answers to questions and summarize responses. They can provide a stahshcal validation of the perceptions of employees about the safety culture. Surveys must be carefully selected and structured to prevent personal bias and a skewing of the responses. 

Measures of person states can be used to evaluate perceptions of culture change and to pinpoint areas of a culture that need special intervention attention. Like most culture surveys, our Safety Culture Survey asks participants to answer questions on a five-point continuum (from highly disagree to highly agree) about their perceptions of the safety culture. Issues include the perceived amount of management support for safety, the willingness of... 

Figure 18.7 These questionnaire items measure personal perception regarding the safety of an organization and were selected from the Safety Culture Survey developed by Safety Performance Solutions, Inc. With permission.

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