•Significant relationships exist between safety system practices and accident rates.•Safety management system characteristics predict worker engagement levels.•Worker engagement levels predict ...accident rates.•Engagement levels act as mediators between safety systems and performance outcomes.•To reduce accidents, safety systems should include worker engagement components.
The overall research objective was to theoretically and empirically develop the ideas around a system of safety management practices (ten practices were elaborated), to test their relationship with objective safety statistics (such as accident rates), and to explore how these practices work to achieve positive safety results (accident prevention) through worker engagement.
Data were collected using safety manager, supervisor and employee surveys designed to assess and link safety management system practices, employee perceptions resulting from existing practices, and safety performance outcomes.
Results indicate the following: there is a significant negative relationship between the presence of ten individual safety management practices, as well as the composite of these practices, with accident rates; there is a significant negative relationship between the level of safety-focused worker emotional and cognitive engagement with accident rates; safety management systems and worker engagement levels can be used individually to predict accident rates; safety management systems can be used to predict worker engagement levels; and worker engagement levels act as mediators between the safety management system and safety performance outcomes (such as accident rates).
Even though the presence of safety management system practices is linked with incident reduction and may represent a necessary first-step in accident prevention, safety performance may also depend on mediation by safety-focused cognitive and emotional engagement by workers. Thus, when organizations invest in a safety management system approach to reducing/preventing accidents and improving safety performance, they should also be concerned about winning over the minds and hearts of their workers through human performance-based safety management systems designed to promote and enhance worker engagement.
There is overwhelming evidence the impacts of climate change present a probable threat to personal health and safety. However, traditional risk management approaches have not been applied to ...ameliorate the crises. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact on personal motivation for action of a communication intervention that framed climate change as a safety issue that can be mitigated through a safety and health risk management framework. Participants' perception of climate change in terms of its anthropogenicity, context and importance, perception as a personal threat, belief in the efficacy of human action, motivating drivers for action, knowledge of climate change impacts, perceived personal barriers to climate action, and short- and long-term preferences for mitigating actions were evaluated. In addition, this study assessed the role of personal worldview on motivation for climate action.
Through an online survey instrument embedded with a communication/education intervention, data were collected from N = 273 participants. Pre and post-intervention responses were assessed using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and descriptive statistics. A path analysis assessed the influence of anthropogenicity, personal impact, and human efficacy beliefs on participant motivation for action. Multi-regression analyses and descriptive statics were used to evaluate the role of worldview on participant motivation for climate action.
Personal motivation for action significantly increased post-intervention. Anthropogenicity, personal impact, and human efficacy beliefs were predictive of personal motivation. Those who prioritized climate change as a safety issue and those driven by a desire to protect current and future generations had higher levels of personal motivation, post-intervention. Knowledge of climate change increased, psychosocial factors as barriers to climate action decreased, and preferences for personal mitigating actions shifted towards more impactful choices post-intervention. Holding Egalitarian worldviews significantly predicted climate action motivation.
Presenting climate change and climate action strategies via a traditional health and safety risk management context was effective in increasing personal motivation for climate action. This study contributes to the literature on climate change communication and climate action motivation.
The aim of this study was to examine contributing factors to fatalities in electrical occupations due to contact with electricity.
Proportionate mortality ratios were calculated along with the ...Mantel-Haenszel chi-square test of significance using Occupational Safety and Health Administration data. Cross-tabulation analyses were examined by the Pearson chi-square test of independence.
Electricians and electrical power installers/repairers experienced significantly higher proportions of fatalities due to contact with electric current of machine, tool, or light fixture and contact with overhead power lines, respectively. Factors such as accident date, location, union status, project type, cost, electrical event, human factor, part of body, source of injury, and fatality cause, exhibited significant associations with electrical trade fatalities.
Fatalities in electrical occupations are attributable to increased exposures to electrical hazards during regular work activities. Strict adherence to safe work practices and procedures is critical to electrical fatality prevention.
•The effect of human performance S&H management practices on injury/illness rates was explored.•Establishment size and industry were examined as exploratory moderators.•Each practice and the unitary ...system significantly predicted injury/illness rates.•The effects were stable across industrial sectors but varied with establishment size.
To date, research on the nature of human performance focused safety and health (S&H) management practices and their impact on occupational injuries and illnesses has been sparse within the safety literature. We addressed this research gap through a large-scale empirical study that explored the impact of S&H management practices on establishment level injuries and illnesses. Based on a sample of 364 establishments, we found that each of the individual practices identified, as well as the unitary system of S&H management practices, significantly predicted objective establishment-level safety performance. We also found that the effect of these practices on accident rates was stable across major industrial sector types but varied with establishment size.
•Occupational Safety & Health (OSH) master’s curricula requires better alignment with employer needs.•OSH master’s curricula should include project management, auditing, leadership, training, and ...environmental, health and safety (EHS) management.•Academia can better promote OSH occupational closure.
This study concurrently investigated the characteristics of 20 distance learning United States OSH M.S. programs and 101 OSH employment postings preferring or requiring candidates with an advanced degree. The goal was to determine if there was consensus in the required curricula and employer demands. Such agreement is one of the requirements for achieving occupational closure, an important step for OSH being considered a profession. The results demonstrated there is both diversity in OSH M.S. courses being offered and in knowledge, skills, and abilities being sought by employers. A Pareto comparison analysis illustrated that more OSH M.S. programs should offer courses in project management, auditing, leadership, training, and environmental, health and safety (EHS) management. Less emphasis should be given to research methods, capstone or thesis projects, and OSH management. At the OSH M.S. hiring level, there appeared to be more of an emphasis on management and soft skills than technical skills. It also appeared that many employers were hiring OSH individuals that have environmental responsibilities (not well represented in current curricula), supporting an EHS versus OSH paradigm. The most common job requirement sought by employers was regulatory knowledge, a course required in most OSH M.S. curricula. Specific recommendations are provided based on the study results to further promote the goal of OSH occupational closure.
Key Takeaways
OSH professionals perceive their performance is measured by five overarching categories: job expectations, lagging indicators, soft skills, leading indicators and values.
The perception ...of how safety professionals' performance is measured is consistent across industry sectors.
Evidence suggests that OSH professionals' performance is primarily measured on job expectations, not lagging indicators.
Lagging indicators, soft skills and leading indicators are equally perceived as the second most important factor in which safety professionals' performance is measured.
Considering the multitasking, boundary-spanning and cross-functional nature of the safety profession, OSH professionals' roles are often complicated and blurred, and can leave one wondering, on what basis is individual performance measured? One could immediately jump to the perhaps unfair conclusion that if incident rates (lagging indicators) climb, the overall perception of the safety professional's performance dips. However, with the growing popularity of using leading indicators to measure organizational performance, some safety professionals are using them as personal markers of success when discussing their individual performance with their managers. Although many organizations are using a balanced scorecard approach to assessing safety performance (e.g., using both leading and lagging indicators), it is not certain that individual safety professional performance is being similarly measured. A broader question to answer may be, what do safety professionals currently believe they are being assessed on in this potentially changing evaluation environment?
Thus, the aim of this study is to examine trends in safety professionals' perceptions on how their workplace performance is measured. There is little or no literature on the topic of performance measures currently used to evaluate the individual safety professional. It is important to consider whether safety professionals repeatedly list certain traits, skills or other assets as impacting their individual performance assessment.
This study is limited in that the researchers asked ASSP member safety professionals to comment on what they believe, as opposed to what they know, regarding how their performance is being assessed. It is often difficult to know with certainty on what criteria our performance/worth is being measured (especially if clear and precise performance criteria are not present in performance evaluation documents) without overtly asking our many stakeholders their opinions, which may or may not be forthright. However, we can be informed by the perception trends existing among other like safety professionals.
ART & SCIENCE OF MINDFULNESS Martin, Linda F.; Wachter, Jan K.
Professional safety,
08/2018, Letnik:
63, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Key Takeaways
Mindfulness has been applied increasingly to stress and wellness management; however, its importance to the practice of safety is just becoming recognized.
Mindfulness fosters positive ...attributes linked with enhanced task-specific safety performance.
Meditation training can be provided to line workers by adapting tools such as smartphone apps. Typical exercises include guided meditations, breath control, body scans, self/team focusing activities and examination routines.
Mindfulness is defined as the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one's thoughts, emotions or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis and "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally" (Kabat-Zinn, 1994). Although mindfulness has its origin in Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice, it has been applied as a treatment for a myriad of things, most notably mental and behavioral health issues (Brown, Ryan & Creswell, 2007; Hayes, Luoma, Bond, et al., 2006). Research on mindfulness has increased almost exponentially since the late 1970s and early 1980s with nearly 700 journal publications on mindfulness being recorded in 2017 (AMRA, 2018), giving way to promoting mindfulness and its beneficial results for many different applications including workplace wellness.
A state of mindfulness has been associated with many behavioral conditions, such as conscientiousness (Giluk, 2009; Latzman & Masuda, 2013), engagement, including traits such as commitment, loyalty, productivity and ownership (Wellins & Concelman, 2005), and improved task performance (Dane & Brummel, 2014; Shonin, Van Gordon, Dunn, et al., 2014). Notably, mindfulness has been shown more recently to positively influence worker safety in several limited studies (Betts & Hinsz, 2015; Dierynck, Leroy, Savage, et al., 2017; Huber, Hill & Merritt, 2015; Nolan, 2017; Zhang, Ding, Li, et al., 2013; Zhang & Wu, 2014).
SAFETY PROFESSIONALS Mullins-Jaime, Charmaine; Wachter, Jan K
Professional safety,
02/2023, Letnik:
68, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Change Agents for Climate Action A CHANGE AGENT is a person who suggests performance improvements and inspires the organization to become engaged and then to transform (DeRose, 2004). ...a change ...agent serves as a catalyst to bring about some sort of organizational change, which could be large or small and could have great or limited impact depending on the context. ...a change agent advances organizational performance. In its 2018 special report, "Global Warming of 1.5 °C," IPCC urges capping warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100 to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Since human activities have already been linked to causing 1 °C of warming, meeting this objective requires a sharp decrease in greenhouse gas emissions (50% reduction) by year 2030 and achieving net-zero emission by year 2050. In the U.S. alone, some of these impacts include more severe wildfires, wildfire-related fatalities, respiratory hazards associated with fire smoke, greater prevalence of severe storms, excessive flooding in some regions (e.g., the midwestern U.S.) and extreme droughts in other regions (e.g., the southwestern U.S.), rise in vector-borne illness and fatalities, temperature extremes, a rise in
Change Agents for Climate Action Mullins-Jaime, Charmaine; Wachter, Jan K
Professional safety,
02/2023, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A CHANGE AGENT is a person who suggests performance improvements and inspires the organization to become engaged and then to transform (DeRose, 2004). ...a change agent serves as a catalyst to bring ...about some sort of organizational change, which could be large or small and could have great or limited impact depending on the context. ...a change agent advances organizational performance. In its 2018 special report, "Global Warming of 1.5 °C," IPCC urges capping warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100 to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Since human activities have already been linked to causing 1 °C of warming, meeting this objective requires a sharp decrease in greenhouse gas emissions (50% reduction) by year 2030 and achieving net-zero emission by year 2050. In the U.S. alone, some of these impacts include more severe wildfires, wildfire-related fatalities, respiratory hazards associated with fire smoke, greater prevalence of severe storms, excessive flooding in some regions (e.g., the midwestern U.S.) and extreme droughts in other regions (e.g., the southwestern U.S.), rise in vector-borne illness and fatalities, temperature extremes, a rise in heat-related illness
Ethics Wachter, Jan K.
Professional safety,
06/2011, Letnik:
56, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ethics is a decidedly different approach to traditional safety management strategies which could be viewed as not being entirely supportive of an ethical basis for managing safety. As a result, most ...corporate managers and many safety professionals may view it as absurd. Safety professionals need to promote a more ethical approach to managing their profession. Doing so requires moral courage, conviction and professional unity, including a bottom-up approach at worksites and through professional organizations.
PDF
