A New Safety Culture Assessment Model: Understanding Employee Engagement in a Company's Safety Program

Abstract In order to help organizations understand the maturity of their safety culture, assessment tools have been developed to provide insight into the employee's consideration of messaging and programs. These tools have helped companies identify and address shortcomings in their culture. However, something that can be missed with these surveys is the assessment of employees’ engagement, along with their trust in their management and beliefs in the company's safety programs. Research has shown a direct link between employee engagement and superior safety performance. If we look at the safety culture maturity of a company through the lens of employee engagement, we should assess culture with a tool designed to understand the level of engagement and barriers to improvement. Using a third-party employee survey tool, new questions were delivered to the organization. A team of operational and safety leaders created the new questions based on the expectations and programs within a company. These questions included actions and beliefs such as how often employees report incidents, near misses, or stop work when needed. Questions were also designed to identify potential leadership or organizational barriers including how the reports are viewed and valued by those up the chain of command. Once the questions were reviewed and approved by organizational leadership, they were delivered through an online employee survey tool run by a third party. One of the challenges when introducing new questions regarding safety culture is internal and external benchmarking. Extensive discussions were held with leadership around the benefits of replacing the third-party standard safety questions with a new set that would not be comparable to historical measures. The belief that insight into specific actions is being taken around programs such as incident reporting, and how the reporting is being received and acted on by leadership was viewed as a more important measure of culture. The survey itself had a decent participation rate. Data was collected for over 50 sites and lent insight into how employees are engaged in the safety programs and if they believe and trust the organization to respond appropriately. Some of the results were surprising, including the percentage of employees who stated that they reported all incidents. This proposed model for safety culture maturity can help an organization understand how engaged their employees are in safety, and what potential barriers there may be to that engagement. There have been decades of research on business performance tied to employee engagement, and the importance of an organization's safety culture, combining the two concepts can help further improve safety performance and reduce risk.