Achieving a Total Safety Culture requires the organization identify the barriers preventing employees and leaders from performing their best. Otherwise, tremendous effort may be lost pursuing initiatives that miss the mark. SPS offers a comprehensive safety culture assessment that measures employees’ perceptions about the overall effectiveness of the organization’s safety culture. Results of the assessment serve a number of functions. They act as a diagnostic tool to target areas warranting attention, and identify barriers to the improvement efforts. The results can also be used as a performance measure to assess the success of ongoing safety improvement efforts, as well as to benchmark performance against other organizations. Finally, the assessment provides an avenue for employee input into safety improvement efforts.
How Can SPS Help?
SPS’s Safety Culture Assessment is comprised of four tools listed below:
SPS’s Safety Culture Survey allows you to identify your safety culture’s strengths and weaknesses by measuring employees’ perceptions about the effectiveness of the current safety culture. This is the quickest way to gain the most information about employee’s perceptions of the current culture.
The survey instrument used in the Safety Culture Assessment was originally developed and validated in 1991 by members of Safety Performance Solutions (Drs. Scott Geller and Steve Roberts) who were then involved in research conducted at Virginia Tech’s Center for Applied Behavioral Systems. The 92-item survey was most recently revised in 2010. The survey measures employee perceptions of a wide variety of safety-related issues:
Used by itself or in conjunction with our other safety culture assessment tools, the survey can identify what the organization is doing well and what the organization needs to improve upon in order to achieve a Total Safety Culture. The survey can be used to see differences in departments, sites, or regions. Up to 3 different demographic categories can be used (for example, a common set of demographic categories is Department, Organizational Level, and Shift).
The SCS is available in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Japanese, Malay, Korean, Thai, Turkish, Romanian, Polish, Indonesian-Bahase, Czech, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, Arabic and Simplified Chinese. Additional languages can be developed as needed.
Focus Group interviews are conducted with a representative sample of the organization to gain additional details not provided from either the Safety Culture Survey or the Safety Management Systems Assessment. In effect, the two tools described above reveal ‘how’ employees feel (e.g., 72% of wage employees agreed with the following item: “Management encourages me to take unnecessary risks’), and interview data helps explain ‘why.’ Questions consist of a standard set applicable to all organizations and a custom set derived from low-scoring items from the survey and management systems assessment exercise. SPS consultants are focused on eliciting specific examples from interviewees, rather than accepting vague or ambiguous references that would be difficult to substantiate. Comments are analyzed by nature and frequency and are integrated with the results of the other assessment tools in the final report.
Structured Interview Protocol. Interviews are held in groups of 4-7 individuals and last approximately one hour each. Interviews are scheduled with representatives from throughout the organization, and held with ‘natural work groups’. At each client location, SPS typically conducts approximately 6 interview sessions over each 8 hour day: (1) senior leadership, (1) supervision, (2-3) hourly from production, and (1-2) hourly from maintenance. However, it is best to include at least one separate interview session for each of the demographic categories used in the survey.
This component of the assessment protocol uses a structured group exercise to lead a cross-sectional team of client personnel through the examination of 10 common safety management systems to a) assess how each system is designed to function, b) what individuals at different levels of the organization know and understand about each system, and c) how each system is perceived to function in the field. The purpose is not so much to measure the systems’ effectiveness in accomplishing its primary mission, but to understand its impact on the organization’s safety culture, given how it functions. Systems investigated include leadership commitment to safety, discipline, rewards and recognition, observation and feedback, safety communication, safety accountability, environmental audits and inspections, safety policies and procedures, safety committees, and incident reporting and investigation.
Groups rate various attributes of each system on a four-point scale, with each anchor describing a stage in the evolution of that particular safety management system (i.e., Beginning, Improving, Achieving, and Leading). The group then discusses their individual ratings, allowing the SPS facilitator to gather rich information regarding the state of each of the safety management systems.
SPS’s360-degree LEADS assessment is an analysis tool to evaluate leadership behavior which impacts the organization’s safety culture and performance. LEADS provides individual leaders valuable insight into how others perceive their leadership skills, and allows them to compare those perceptions with their own self-assessment. LEADS also provides aggregate data to the organization on the perceived performance of the collective group’s leadership effectiveness. That is, the LEADS assessment:
The LEADS assessment tool contains seven critical leadership dimensions, with each dimension containing 5 – 8 items describing specific behaviors leaders must perform well to be effective safety champions. Specifically, the LEADS tool measures how effectively leaders promote:
Separate tools are used to assess leaders at the senior management/executive level and those at a supervisory level.
Individual summary reports are generated for each participating leader, allowing them to ‘calibrate’ their own perceptions with those of others and to identify strengths and performance improvement opportunities.