This explored the relationship between workers’ safety climate perceptions and safety management practices (SMPs), arguing that SC may be a parallel outcome of workplace safety practices rather than as a determinant of worker behaviour.
25 commercial construction companies in Colombia were assessed, alongside 256 individuals within the companies.
SMPs included 15 safety practices (eg training, hazard recognition, accident investigation) grouped under 1) determining construction site hazard profile, 2) management commitment to safety, 3) improving system safety, 4) OHS training (see comments below for an extract of the specific SMP practices evaluated).
Results:
Found was that, workers’ perceptions of SC from a given company were independent of that company’s implementation of SMPs.
They note that these findings suggest that simply creating or stating a procedure or policy isn’t an effective way to influence worker perceptions of SC. They further argue that most SMPs are introduced onsite by safety people who often work in parallel but are independent from or with limited collaboration with field supervisors.
Thus, even though SMPs may be formally or informally communicated to workers, they may not be reinforced by site people, nor valued by them. Or to quote the authors, “This could readily be seen by workers as a disconnection between safety requirements and daily practices” (p565).
Consistent with other research, no association was found between workers’ perceptions of SC and company injury rates (eg see the recent Safety of Work podcast about safety climate and injuries).
However, “results indicated that injury rates were negatively related to the implementation of SMPs, indicating that implementation of SMPs is the more important predictor of construction injury rate experience” (p563). Expanding here, the 3-year injury rate wasn’t correlated with the average SC score, but in contrast 3-year injury rate was negatively associated with overall SMP implementation.
That is, implementation of SMPs is more likely to benefit safety performance than “trying to change workers’ perceptions without efforts to reduce unsafe conditions in the workplace” (p565).
Regarding the effects of SMP practices on 3-year injury rate, neither management commitment nor worker training was associated; whereas improving the hazard profile of the construction site and improving system safety were related.
Further, they discuss that it’s likely that employee perceptions of SC reflect the general degrees of safety in the company rather than playing a causal role in the pathway of injury occurrence. Because of this and considering the links above to improving hazard profiles at sites (but not surprisingly): “problems should be remediated at the point where they are caused, not where they manifest themselves downstream” (p565).
Overall the authors conclude that the lack of strong association b.t. workers’ general perceptions via SC and SMP was a bit surprising – although consistent with a recent meta-analysis finding that SC isn’t a strong predictor of injuries (but more that injuries influences SC).
In discussing this they say that “Perhaps managers overstated their practices or perhaps in the dynamic work environment on a construction site, workers are not in a position to observe some of the measures that safety staff take or in a position to try to reduce hazards”. They further question the appropriateness of safety interventions directed solely at improving SC (e.g. hearts & minds) rather than considering SC as an indicator.
Finally, as expected, the results suggest that practices implemented to control hazards in the workplace & prevent hazard exposure seemed to minimise the likelihood of injuries in construction.
For specific SMPs, management commitment to safety was the most likely practice to be implemented and OHS training practices were the lowest implemented. Safety responsibilities assigning responsibilities to all company levels including supervisors, contractors & subbies were most often reported to be used. Implementation of planning tools (goal setting, contractor participation & worker participation) obtained the lowest implementation scores.
SafetyInsights.org 