Many construction companies and safety professionals realize having a better understanding of employees’ perceptions about job site safety and health can provide opportunities to prevent adverse outcomes before they occur.
These perceptions contribute to a company’s safety climate, which includes safety management practices, policies and procedures used on job sites. Although many large construction companies have the resources to pay for safety climate assessments and create safety management tools, small- and medium-sized firms often lack the personnel or finances to do so.
To address this need, researchers at CPWR–The Center for Construction Research and Training began working with industry stakeholders to develop a variety of resources and tools to help remedy this disparity, including safety climate assessment tools and a training program, Foundations for Safety Leadership, designed to provide crew leaders the skills to create and maintain a positive job site safety climate.
Its most recent resource, the Safety Climate-Safety Management Information System, or SC-SMIS, brings these and many other resources together into an easy-to-use, interactive, web-based system that any company regardless of size or available resources can use free of charge to engage in continuous safety management improvement.
Developing SC-SMIS
To ensure the SC-SMIS would be valuable to all companies, the research team engaged 12 safety professionals from small- and medium-sized construction companies throughout the U.S. to join a user development team. The team’s key task was to provide ongoing input and feedback to the researchers pertaining to the new system’s overall design, as well as its features and functions.
The research team also asked numerous safety professionals working at large construction companies to share any safety management resources including policies, procedures, guidelines and templates they currently use to strengthen safety climates on their job sites. The researchers and user development team reviewed the resources received and identified 89 that could be feasibly used by small- and medium-sized companies.
At the end of a two-year development phase, the SC-SMIS underwent useability and pilot testing and was made available to the broader construction community in January 2022. Since then, close to 1,000 companies, both construction and nonconstruction, have created accounts, and the safety management resources have been downloaded more than 130,000 times.
How to use it
The SC-SMIS is easy to use. Imagine you are a roofing contractor doing business in the Midwest and employ 75 roofing workers, office staff and management personnel. You recently experienced increases in your company’s recordable incident rate; days away, restricted or transfer; and experience modification rate.
To help improve the situation, you decide to use the SC-SMIS to better understand your employees’ safety climate perceptions. You also hope the system will have some safety management procedures and policies you can use to proactively address identified issues, reduce adverse safety and health outcomes and improve your lagging indicator scores.
When you go to the SC-SMIS homepage, you watch two short videos and create a company account. Then, you click to learn about two available surveys: the Safety Climate Assessment Tool (S-CAT) and the Safety Climate Assessment Tool for Small Contractors (S-CATsc). S-CAT measures safety climate maturity, and S-CATsc provides a basic needs assessment.
Both measure the eight leading safety climate indicators:
After looking closely at both surveys, you determine S-CAT will provide the information you need to improve your company’s safety climate.
You are pleased to learn you didn’t have to enter employee names into the system. Rather, you only have to tell the system which employee groups will be asked to complete S-CAT; in this case, those groups are management, roofing workers and office staff.
After you do that, you receive three system-generated emails that forward to each group. The instructions in each email emphasize that though you can edit the text, you must not remove or change the URL embedded in the text because it contains the survey link for that specific group.
You tailor each email to the group in the subject line, leaving the URL intact, and forward it to the employees in that group. Once the emails are sent, you monitor how many employees in each group completed S-CAT. You send out a couple of reminders to the groups to help make sure everyone who wants to complete the survey has a chance to do so.
Once you are happy with the number of responses, you run the reports. You review each group’s safety climate maturity scores, examine the scores across the groups and compare your company’s scores to industry benchmarks. One result that pops out is a low score for Empower and Involve Employees. You dig deeper into the report and see a majority of employees said they were unaware of their involvement and role in safety and didn’t feel comfortable bringing up safety-related issues.
You then call a meeting with project managers and supervisors to share the report’s findings and discuss ideas for how to improve the score. You and your team review the evidence-informed safety management policies, procedures, guidelines and templates contained within the SC-SMIS that are specifically designed to help strengthen the Empower and Involve Employees safety climate indicator.
You’re pleased to see they are available in English and Spanish and you can tailor the resources to your company’s needs. Your team chooses three to start with.
You then schedule another meeting with your management team and a handful of lead frontline workers to discuss how to start using the new policies and procedures on job sites. Before the meeting, you download a blank action plan template from the SC-SMIS to help guide the discussion. At the end of the meeting, you enter the information into the online action plans in your account that allows you to keep track of the implementation progress by updating the action steps. You also schedule a reminder to conduct a follow-up S-CAT in a year to see whether scores improve.
Twelve months later, you conduct the follow-up S-CAT assessment. You follow the same process as before. You again run reports comparing the new scores with the previous year’s scores and are happy to see the scores have improved.
To share the good news with everyone, you arrange for a special all-employee lunch. You review the S-CAT results and mention the indicators with improvements. You promise to keep listening to your team’s ideas and working together to be the safest company possible.
A useful tool
Better understanding employees’ perceptions can help you proactively identify and improve issues that may lead to adverse safety and health outcomes. For many small- and medium-sized businesses, conducting annual safety climate assessments and improving safety management policies and procedures are out of reach. The SC-SMIS tool was developed to enable smaller organizations to learn about their employees’ perceptions and access existing, established safety management resources they can use to continuously improve and strengthen their companies’ safety climate.
Linda M. Goldenhar, PH.D., recently retired from CPWR-The Center for Research and Training where she was the director of research and evaluation.
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