Workplace Employee Relations Survey

Cully, M. and others 1998. The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey first findings. Department of Trade and Industry. 

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. 

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. 

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