Does safety make a difference? The impact of safety observations on injury likelihoods

According to Liberty Mutual’s 2021 Workplace Safety Index, it was estimated that employers paid more than $1 billion per week in direct workers’ compensation costs for disabling, non-fatal workplace injuries in 2018 (2021 workplace, 2021). Accordingly, organizations frequently engage in safety practices in the hopes of reducing these financial and human costs. The aim of this study was to examine whether performing safety observations reduced the likelihood of adverse outcomes. A safety observation refers to a checklist of behaviors deemed “safe” that should be conducted to help decrease or completely eliminate a safety incident. A safety incident is an event that causes an injury to an employee. We obtained three years of safety data, which included the observation counts and incident counts, from a large chemical manufacturing company in the United States. Safety observations were normalized by work hours to ultimately reflect the total number of observations per an 8-hour shift. Safety incidents were dichotomized to indicate: did an incident occur (1) or an incident did not occur (0). A rolling sum time-series logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze whether observations over the previous seven days decreased the odds of an incident occurring over the next seven days. The logistic regression analyses were performed within two different work units: Division 1 (chemical manufacturer) and Division 2 (maintenance). These divisions engage in disparate yet similarly risky types of work, allowing us to examine the generalizability of results across multiple work units. Our results indicated that observations reported today (day 0) reduce the probability of an incident occurring over the next three days across Division 1 and Division 2. Specifically, the odds of an incident occurring over the next three days was reduced by 0.23 (odds ratio) and 0.14 respectively, per each additional observation performed. This could prevent three incidents for Division 1 and could result in 16 fewer incidents for Division 2 over a year. These results suggest that using safety observations to mitigate incident risk is possible and highly advantageous. Performing safety observations while engaging in dangerous work can reduce injuries in the workplace, saving not only lives, but also time, energy, effort, and money. However, to make this a consistent practice requires a very proactive safety culture, accurate and consistent safety reporting, and support from upper management

The relationship between leadership engagement and workplace incidents

Organizations with strong safety cultures tend to have fewer injuries, which is likely attributed to an increased engagement in safe work behaviors (Dejoy, 2005; DeJoy et al., 1995; Zou, 2011). Furthermore, Hahn and Murphy suggest that engagement behaviors in safety management systems also contribute to a strong safety culture (2008). Engagement behaviors in safety management systems include reporting near misses and minor injuries as well as engaging in safety policies and practices that are perceived as important to the organization and its leaders. In this study, we will be examining how leadership engagement in safety practices is related to near misses and workplace incidents at a large chemical manufacturing company in the United States. The company recently implemented a leadership engagement tool called the ZIM Tracker (Zero-Incident Mindset), which is designed to encourage leaders to engage in and track safety practices in hopes that it will ultimately lead to a decrease in workplace incidents. The ZIM Tracker presents individuals and groups with monthly safety goals, which include over 20 different safety practices, such as Pre-Job Hazard Assessment or Emergency Drill Participation, identified by the company. We suggest that if leaders are more engaged in safety practices and tracking those practices, then the number of reported near misses will increase and the number of workplace incidents will decrease. The number of reported near misses will increase because the leaders’ engagement will signal to the employees that it is important to report near misses, which will allow for the situations leading to a near miss to be addressed. By addressing these near misses, we expect a subsequent decrease in workplace incidents. Because the ZIM Tracker is a relatively new tool, it is important to evaluate its validity over its three years of implementation. We expect that if the ZIM Tracker is encouraging leaders to engage in and report safety practices then there will be an increase in safety practices reported and conducted because leaders will be motivated to achieve their safety goals within the ZIM Tracker. We also expect that this increase will subsequently lead to an increase in reported near misses and a decrease in workplace incidents. To test this hypothesis, we will examine safety outcome data over the three years prior to the implementation of the ZIM Tracker compared to three years after implementation