Safe As week in review – eps 19-21: Safety leadership, ISO certification, and Haddon’s 10 energy countermeasures

Safe As week in review. This week covered three episodes:

1. Ep 19: What is the evidence behind safety leadership – silverbullet or hype? They analysed 175 articles for the effects of different leadership categories on various safety elements (image 1).

They found leadership behaviours were associated with various workplace safety elements in varying degrees, “Task-oriented leadership followed by relational-oriented leadership emerge[d] as the most important contributors to workplace safety [as measured by the indices in this study”

Ep 19: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fwH65BXEIsOWPJLAdo3FN?si=jygKMbANTPygXTvRYRZRIA

2. Ep 20: How does ISO 18001 certification influence safety indices? This study compared 805 adopters vs >12k non-adopters over several years.

They found that certification didn’t led to any reductions in severe incidents 3 years post certification (image 2), but adopters started with lower reported incidents prior to cerfification.

Ep 20: https://open.spotify.com/episode/78yaVpW7a6PnhI9nMBq6oC?si=yvAJ_UKCSW2xdKVgZkRHtw

3. In this quickisode, Haddon’s 10 countermeasures for energy exchanges was discussed. Haddon’s approach can be considered as an alternative or compliment to the Hierarchy of Controls.

Ep 21: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sORW4YSo4yAfTxCJuuFg3?si=Q5j_SBO0Q2CZQqTD2PsI7g

Refs:

Image 1: Lyubykh, Z., Turner, N., Hershcovis, M. S., & Deng, C. (2022). A meta-analysis of leadership and workplace safety: Examining relative importance, contextual contingencies, and methodological moderators. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(12), 2149.

Image 2: Dyreborg, J., Thorsen, S. V., Madsen, C. U., & Hasle, P. (2024). Effectiveness of OHSAS 18001 in reducing accidents at work. A follow-up study of 13,102 workplaces. Safety Science, 177, 106573.

Image 3: My own image