Safety climate' describes how people feel about safety and offers a unique insight into an organisation's safety culture. In turn, safety culture is one of the strongest indicators of organisational health and safety performance so, not only can a positive safety climate have a favourable effect on accident rates, it can also have an impact on productivity, reliability, competitiveness and employee morale.
A successful survey depends on paying attention to these key issues:
- be clear about survey aims and objectives
- secure senior management commitment
- engage staff and get their buy-in
- assure anonymity and/ or confidentiality of survey responses
- issue reminders
- communicate the results
- act on the findings and following a logical step-by-step approach.
Plan
The first stage of the process is to understand what you want to achieve: do you want to improve, or benchmark your organisation against others, or evaluate the impact of change initiatives? At the outset, you need to consider why you are carrying out the survey, what you hope to achieve and how the information gathered will help meet your goals.
Visit the supporting resources section to find these documents that will support with the plan phase:
- understanding ASCENT and how the Safety Climate Tool supports this
- saking the case
- stakeholder management
- managing your Safety Climate Tool as a project
- managing your Safety Climate Tool schedule
- steering group rules of engagement
- white papers.
Build
The second stage of the process is to build your survey using the HSE survey delivery system. The video provides a full demonstration of how-to set-up your survey.
Visit the supporting resources section to find these documents that will support with the build phase:
- administrator and user FAQs
Collect
The third stage of the process is to collect responses for your survey. This is one of the most important parts of the survey, as collecting accurate responses is imperative to understanding your workers thoughts and perceptions. The video provides a demonstration of how to collect responses using the system. We also provide a wealth of resources to support getting higher response rates.
Visit the supporting resources section to find these documents that will support with the collect phase:
- workforce briefing messages
- messages for your company Intranet and SharePoint pages
- awareness posters and flyers.
Analyse
The fourth stage of the process is to analyse the results. The safety climate tool report is fully automated, meaning you do not have to spend time collating the data and inputting the results manually. Once a minimum of 10 responses have been collected, it summarises the views and experiences of your employees and provides recommendations for future improvements.
The video provides a demonstration of how to analyse and compare responses using the system.
Moving forward
The final stage of the process is to continually review and evaluate. The HSE suggests that you monitor and review the effectiveness of your action plan and evaluate whether it is having the desired effect. The information can be used to shape your future strategies and to help you identify the most suitable areas in which to invest your resources.
Visit the supporting resources section to find these documents that will support with the moving forward phase:
- after action review
- steering groups
- consultancy.
Combining multiple surveys
This video will show you how to combine surveys based on certain demographics, so you can build an overall survey for the whole organisation.