What We Do… Our team shows companies how to create positive cultures and climates in workplaces to drive safety improvement, support employee well-being, and promote productive and respectful experiences for everyone.
What You Do… Leaders build a culture of safety by giving their employees the guidance and tools they need to work safely. This means investing in high-quality safety equipment and training, creating policies that clearly prioritize safety, and handling safety problems immediately. In this way, safety can become a key part of your organization’s identity.
Is There A Problem…? Work is an ever-changing landscape, which means safety is too. It’s easy to become complacent when things have been going well. But when work involves safety and health hazards, you need to make changes.
Employees know when they don’t feel safe at work. Their opinions about whether their leaders are truly committed to keeping them safe converge into a climate that can be measured. And what gets measured, gets managed!
Taking Action! By monitoring safety climate, leaders can see the effectiveness of their current safety policies, procedures, and practices. This gives you a chance to proactively identify problems and make targeted improvements to your safety management systems.
Decades of scientific research show that safety climate is a reliable indicator of safe workplace behaviors. As shown in the graph about the transportation industry, companies whose employees view their safety climate as poor (lower climate scores such as a 3.00 rating) have higher injury rates (e.g., 0.6 injuries per million miles), whereas companies whose employees have positive safety climate views (higher climate scores such as a 4.00 rating) have lower rates of accidents and injuries (e.g., 0.3 injuries) reported by Dr. Emily Huang and colleagues (see more in this 2017 Professional Safety article).
For more, visit Dr. Emily Huang’s lab page at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).
How We Can Help You… We offer you a real-time snapshot of your company’s safety climate through our brief (about 15-minute) survey of company employees and leaders. By providing insights into the way safety is handled by company leaders (both top managers and supervisors), survey results from employees highlight areas where improvement is truly needed. We then guide you through strategies you can use to act on these insights by a workshop, intervention examples or online training. This will help you build or improve a strong and sustainable safety culture!
Consultation with Dr. Huang on Safety Climate and Culture is available from NwETA’s Shop page. To learn more about this important area of practice and research, visit Emily Huang’s lab page at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).