Predicting who will cause workplace safety incidents

Under the existing and soon-to-be-released new workplace health and safety regulations, employers are obligated to ensure their workplaces are safe. While the focus of that responsibility has largely been on the workplace itself, work practices, safety systems and education, compliance to these regulations extends beyond just the workplace - it encompasses staff attitudes and their propensity to safety. But how do employers ensure the staff they recruit are going to be safe?

The traditional approach to facilitating employee safety involves comprehensive safety policies and procedures, training programs and regular monitoring. While these elements play critical roles in safety strategies, it’s important to realise that some individuals are inherently more likely to pay attention to them than others. This means that, despite employers’ best efforts to address workplace safety, employing individuals who are less likely to follow safety strategies will expose organisations to higher risks.

Human error and workplace injuries

It’s widely acknowledged that most workplace accidents are precipitated by some form of human error and that some individuals are more likely than others to be involved in accidents or sustain injuries. To the extent that these differences can be measured, organisations can reduce the risk of workplace accidents by making more informed hiring decisions.

An assessment that identifies risk factors in individuals affords the opportunity to screen out high-risk people when recruiting, while actively addressing risky attitudinal elements in successful applicants. This, in turn, complements existing safety strategies in reducing workplace incidents.

Safety risk assessments

Psychometric assessments provide insight into the range of qualities and traits of candidates that are important to their suitability for a position. Although this opportunity is afforded to some extent by alternative selection methods, psychometric assessment has unique qualities that facilitate its effectiveness in the recruitment process.

Psychometric assessments can accurately assess candidates’ safety awareness on a range of factors that have been linked to safety-related behaviours and outcomes in the workplace. Together, these factors - explored below - can provide a comprehensive understanding of overall potential safety risk.

Safety control

This refers to the extent to which workers take responsibility for their own safety. People with a poor sense of safety control tend to attribute accidents and injuries to fate or chance, rather than their own behaviour. They’re seen to present risks to themselves and others as they may expend limited energy in adhering to safety precautions. Conversely, individuals with a strong sense of safety control tend to feel greater personal responsibility for their safety and are more likely to take preventative steps to avoid accidents and injuries.

Risk aversion

This refers to the extent to which individuals seek thrills or excitement by taking safety risks in the workplace. Some demonstrate more high-risk behaviour than others, such as taking short cuts, ignoring safety rules and deviating from safety instructions, often because they enjoy the thrill of engaging in potentially dangerous activities. More conservative and risk-averse individuals are less drawn to potentially dangerous activities and less susceptible to boredom. They are more likely to follow safety protocols, therefore presenting lower safety risks when working.

Stress management

Stress is experienced at different times and in varying degrees by all employees in the workplace. However, individuals differ in how they react and cope with stress. Some have the capacity for calm and controlled responses, and are therefore more likely to remain focused and attentive to their environment during times of stress. Others may react in ways more prone to subsequent mistakes and errors, such as loss of concentration and focus that can lead to workplace incidents.

Drug aversion

This refers to attitudes toward legal and illegal drug use in and outside the workplace. Individuals differ in their attitudes towards drug use, some more tolerant of drugs than others. Individuals with tolerant attitudes are more likely to have used drugs in the past and are less likely to condemn their use around them. Drug-averse individuals tend to have strict attitudes against the use of drugs and are therefore unlikely to work while under the influence of drugs.

Attitude towards violence

This encompasses commonplace acts of violence or aggression in the workplace, including volatile arguments with customers or coworkers and damage of company property. Individuals who view aggressive behaviour as acceptable or justifiable are more likely engage it, compared with those with less-lenient views. Gauging individuals’ acceptance of, and predisposition to engage in violent behaviour, and their capacity to appropriately control strong emotions such as anger, offers insight into their likelihood of exhibiting such behaviour in workplaces.

Faking

Resistance to faking is achieved in several ways to ensure assessment results remain valid and accurate. These include in-built scales designed to detect and flag overly positive and inconsistent responding and assessment questions that ask respondents about their own beliefs and behaviours and the way they view others and the world. This multifaceted insight ensures safety attitudes are comprehensively measured while also decreasing response restoration.

Case studies

Heavy machinery

Three years after introducing online safety assessment, Onetest conducted an impact study of 1243 employees to determine how effectively it predicted safety incidents.

Employees with safety risk scores below the 20th percentile were categorised as ‘high-risk’, while those with scores equal to or above the 20th percentile were categorised as ‘low-risk’. The study found the high-risk employees received average work cover payments of $1643 - four times higher than low-risk, and an average of 4.38 paid leave days - six times more than low-risk employees. Had this organisation not employed those identified as high-risk, they would have saved $101,620 on work cover claims and nearly 300 paid leave days over the period.

Mining

In order to justify the rollout of comprehensive pre-employment safety screening for large infrastructure and mining projects, this company wanted to estimate the return on investment from a pilot implementation of the assessment.

Onetest researched 112 mining employees who completed the online safety assessment. Those with safety scores in the bottom 20th percentile were categorised as high-risk, those with scores between 21st and 79th percentile were categorised as average-risk, and those with scores equal to or above the 80th percentile were categorised as low-risk.

Analysing the safety records of individuals in these groups revealed that, compared to low-risk employees, high-risk employees experienced three times more work accidents, four times as many injuries at work that required medical treatment (MTIs: medical treatment injuries) and five times as many injuries at work that prevented them from working for a complete day or shift (LTIs: lost time injuries).

Workplace adoption

Online pre-employment safety testing is a reliable and efficient way to reduce safety incidents, particularly when combined with traditional OHS strategies.

Given the demonstrable improvements in safety metrics that online safety assessments can deliver, it is concerning that their adoption isn’t more widespread among Australian businesses. Broadly speaking, such low-level adoption can be attributed to:

• Relatively recent introduction to marketplace;
• Low awareness of pre-employment safety assessments;
• Poor understanding/scepticism of effectiveness of pre-employment safety assessments; and
• Corporate politics (eg, HR department seen as a cost centre, or it doesn’t communicate effectively with executive management).

Conclusion

Organisations committed to improving workplace safety should consider adopting the following practices as part of their standard recruitment process:

• Assessing all recruits and subcontractors for safety risk, to identify training and development needs;
• Refusing to hire high-risk people or subcontractors;
• Educating management to understand that high-risk people will potentially hurt themselves and their workmates; and
• Adhering to hiring policies, even when under hiring pressure.

Senior management has a legal and ethical responsibility to provide safe workplaces. Once aware of the impact pre-employment safety assessments can have on reducing workplace incidents, it’s imperative that they give adequate consideration to adopting these assessments to bolster traditional OHS practices in order to reduce their potential liability risk.

by John Richards CEO of Onetest