Study Finds Young Workers Reluctant to Report Minor Injuries

Studies have found that young workers are one of the more vulnerable segments of the workforce and thus more likely to get hurt on the job. And a new study found that when young workers do suffer minor injuries, they’re reluctant to report the injury or the conditions that caused it.

Haskayne School of Business professor Nick Turner co-authored the study, which appears in the June issue of the Journal of Safety Research, with Sean Tucker of the University of Regina and Kevin Kelloway of Saint Mary’s University.

The study examined the self-reported frequency of non-lost work time injuries, or “micro accidents,” over a four-week period from a sample of more than 19,000 young workers in Canada. “Micro accidents” result from same conditions that can lead to more severe injuries.

The researchers also examined the frequency of three types of work-related safety behaviors—safety voice, safety compliance and safety neglect—recalled over that four-week period. Such behaviors could keep young workers from getting injured.

Highlights from the study’s findings:

• Approximately one-third of all young workers recalled experiencing at least one micro accident in the last four weeks
• Younger workers between the ages of 15-18 reported less safety voice, less safety compliance and more safety neglect than workers aged 19-22. That is, this group of young workers spoke up less frequently in the face of dangerous work and reported neglecting work safety rules more frequently than their older counterparts
• Young males reported more micro accidents and more safety voice, safety compliance, and safety neglect than young females 

So how do you get young workers to report unsafe conditions and minor injuries while complying with the company’s safety rules?

“Parents, siblings, friends, teachers and co-workers can all help entrench the importance of work and attitudes of work in young workers, but when it comes to workplace safety, our research is showing it is the adult figure of influence in the workplace—the supervisor—who is the most important social influence,” explained Turner.

“Young workers with supervisors who show the young workers they care about safety are more inclined to speak up about dangerous work and this, in turn, seems to be related to lower workplace injuries.”

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Keep it Simple…To Form Safe Behaviors…Change Their Habits

We need to change the popular saying that we are creatures of habit, because according to psychologists habits make up only 40% of our daily activities.

From the perspective of safety professionals, changing bad habits in the workplace is a 24/7 job that never ends.  Just about every strategy, plan or process they use are in some respects about changing habits.  Psychologists spend their careers on the study of changing behavior.  In fact that’s the definition of psychology:

The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context

There seems to be a never ending list of the steps safety professionals can take to change behavior, from the esoteric to the relatively simple. But you really don’t need to get deep in the weeds of the psychology of behavior, to coach employees in good work safely habits…but you do need some time and persistence.  As long as we understand that to be habitual we need to learn to form connections between different activities. These connections then becomes patterns of behaviors.  Simple?

Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of So California attempted to simply this by using these three easy steps:

Derail existing habits by disrupting habit cues.  Change the way you normally do things, creating a window of opportunity to act on new ways to do them.

Persistence.  The brain is slow to change.  It took a long time to form the habit and research suggests that a new habit takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days to make an action effortless and automatic.

Create new cues.  Remember habits don't exist independently; they are connected to previous actions.

Like everything else in the life of a safety professional, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a safe workplace.  Remember, that a habit consists of cues and responses repeated over and over.  Maybe not so simple?  But easy to understand.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Employee Engagement is a Safety Problem Too!

Today, almost all business performance issues are tied to employee engagement.  Recently the EHS Advisor surveyed over 600 safety professionals across North America and 90% found that the greatest barrier to safe work performance is lack of worker participation.  These professional are not alone.  According to Gallup’s State of American Manager 70% of the entire United States Workforce is disengaged with their job.

The employee engagement model is a vast construct that touches almost all parts of human resource management. It is built on the foundation of earlier strategies like job satisfaction and employee commitment and the research and training plans that affect those strategies. However it is broader in scope. Because of engagement is such a strong predictor of company performance it clearly show the two –way relationship between employer and employee.

Though it is related to and encompasses these concepts, employee engagement is broader in scope. Employee engagement is a stronger predictor of positive organizational performance clearly showing the two-way relationship between employer and employee compared to the three earlier constructs: job satisfaction, employee commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. According to many HR consultants engaged employees…

“are emotionally attached to their organization and highly involved in their job with a great enthusiasm for the success of their employer, going extra mile beyond the employment contractual agreement.”

Employee recognition in all its forms has become the backbone of improving employee engagement.  Direct improvement in performance has been achieved by using this strategy.  And awards for improved safety performance (some would call them safety incentives) are an ideal way of adding recognition to your overall safety effort.  The same tools that apply within the Human resource world to combat employee disengagement are more than present in safety cultures, namely communications, training, measurement, feedback and awards.

A well planned safety recognition effort will reward improved performances, turn them into habits and help to engage your workforce.  Budgets for non-safety employee recognition has been growing consistently for years because it works to improve engagement…it can be that simple!

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How to Make Safety Priority #1 With Executives

In the world of incentives, we often hear that safety professionals have to fight for budget dollars against other processes for production, sales and marketing, etc.  In other words on any given day at any given work-site safety is always Priority One…until it isn’t! If it was truly the utmost priority, safety managers wouldn’t have to fight for every new initiative beyond basic requirements.  If you want to take safety programs from just another line item and turn it into a stand alone strategy, there are three basic things you need to do: 

1.  Make a financial business case for safety to your executive group.  A study published by Accident Analysis and Prevention found that CFOs and other executives believe that for $1 spent improving workplace safety, more than $4 would be returned.  For too long safety professionals sold safety programs as a way to keep a company from losing money.  They do, but they also help to improve a company’s productivity, employee engagement and their ability to make money.
2. Provide motivation for safety among the workforce.  The buzzword for several years now within the human resource precincts has been employee engagement.  Almost everything is tied to it, and now there is more and more evidence that a direct outcome to a more engaged workforce is better company performance.  Behavior based safety applications offers both plant and quality managers an additional level of performance as well.  Well planned safety recognition will reward improved performances, turn them into habits and help to engage your workforce.  Budgets for non-safety employee recognition has been growing consistently for years because it works to improve engagement…it can be that simple!
3. Integrate it into the culture of your company.  Training shows employees how to avoid risk and actions that lead to accidents.  Those skills and habits can be incorporated into other environments to produce fewer performance errors as well.

Will doing the above really improve overall company performance?  In a study published this year titled “Tracking the Market Performance of Companies that Integrate a Culture of Health & Safety: An assessment of Corporate Health Achievement Award Applicants”, researchers showed that the stock market performance of 31 companies that were acknowledged to have exceedingly high safety standards throughout their organization exceeded the S&P average in all 17 measures under examination.  The integration of the above three points makes it clear that safety and and other corporate strategies are inextricably linked.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net