Exploring the culture for safety in manufacturing

Manufacturing remains a dangerous industry, with unsafe machine operating behaviours considered a significant risk of injury. It is also thought that behaviours can be improved by fostering a culture of safety through forming a positive and strong safety climate. In this project, we explored the safety climate and culture in 70 NSW wood and metal manufacturers, inquiring into their day-to-day operations and organisational procedures regarding safety, including safety leadership and performance (safe and unsafe machine operating practices).

Research questions

Seven research questions guided the analysis and interpretation of the research. The major findings
are summarised below, with detailed answers contained within the body of this report.

1. What is the nature of manufacturing-specific safety climate?
2. How can safety leadership and performance be operationalised within manufacturing?
3. What are the relationships between safety climate, leadership, and performance?
4. What perspectives can be gained through exploring the tensions between safety and
   production?
5. How does industry ‘culture for safety’ influence machine operators’ safety capability?
6. What differences exist, if any, between young and old workers’ safety perceptions and behaviours?
7. What is the impact of an online safety leadership training package on safety climate, leadership, and/or performance?

Conclusions

Overall, we found that safety climate used in isolation lacks enough specificity to identify shortcomings in the organisational culture that carry effects on safety. Although safety climate can be used as a coarse measure of the underlying safety culture and can potentially distinguish organisations based on the conduciveness of their cultures for safety, the quantitative differences may be small, and thus runs the risk of generating a ‘false negative’ — failing to detect important issues that contribute to safety capability and performance.

Importantly, the qualitative data highlighted the dynamic interplay between production and safety goals, and the tactics manufacturers use to resolve this tension. Exploring this tension provides fertile ground for drawing together strategies to raise the priority of safety. Acknowledging that safety will sometimes not be first, due to the viability of the business, but always prioritised so far as reasonably practicable, provides a more inspiring and motivating vision for safety.

There was little quantitative evidence of younger workers (<25 years) being exposed to less effective safety practices in the participating workplaces. To some extent the opposite was found, whereby young workers were more positive than older workers on some elements, particularly training and development. However, in the interviews, some workers raised that younger workers lack focus and attention, e.g. forgetting PPE and not concentrating on what they are doing. The data also suggest that there may be some role modelling by experienced operators that causes younger workers to think they can adeptly take shortcuts and risks.
Another cause for concern was the observation of increased frequency of at-risk machine operating behaviours among culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) workers. Interviewees raised examples of CALD workers being actively discouraged from reporting safety issues and generally experiencing a higher level of job insecurity. However, as the number of CALD workers in this study was small (n=15), these results should be treated with caution.

In addition to these results describing the nature of safety culture within manufacturing, the performance of the new safety climate, leadership, and machine operating behaviour scales were evaluated. The safety climate scale was found to be a stronger predictor of machine operating behaviours than safety leadership, so could be used as an organisational diagnostic tool to target areas for improvement. The safety climate scale was correlated with an existing measure and showed acceptable psychometric properties.
Finally, our evaluation of the leadership intervention did not find quantitative evidence of change over time. Improving safety culture in manufacturing likely requires a multi-pronged approach that goes beyond an online safety leadership training program.

Recommendations

Synthesising the findings of this project, we make the following strategic recommendations regarding the manufacturing culture for safety and its role in driving safety performance:

Recommendation 1

The resources developed during this project could be made into a manufacturing safety culture toolkit that includes these new resources as well as those already in existence. Concurrent development of suitable interview/focus group protocol(s) that could be used in combination with the newly-developed safety climate scale could also be created. Focus on the needs of small-medium operations who likely require support to help resolve safety-production tensions favourably, which could include tools like safety requirement factsheets, template procedures, and other practical resources that would help to integrate safety within production processes.

Recommendation 2

Organisations could periodically (6-12 monthly) measure organisational culture for safety using a combination of methods — combine a quantitative safety climate survey with qualitative investigations that can be done via interview or focus group methods. Use the safety climate data as an initial pulse check of the state of safety and expand on this information with targeted interviews that provide detail around the nature of the survey themes and findings.

Recommendation 3

The manufacturing industry could shift the focus for safety to one that takes it beyond ‘safety first’ and towards one that recognises the trade-offs and tensions that can exist between production and safety, and that it needs ongoing attention to keep in front. Use words and phrases that are about pushing safety forward; advancing, evolving, innovation, imagination, or vision; words that suggest that there is no limit for the organisation to moving forward, and that the journey will be ongoing.

Recommendation 4

Organisations could seek to enhance supervisor and managerial leadership capabilities through leadership development training and resources (such as the ones developed for this project) and peer mentoring/networking opportunities. Focus leadership development initiatives around being visible on the floor, spending time understanding and appreciating operators’ experiences in the manufacturing environment and engaging in regular two-way communication to be abreast of safety and work-related issues.

Recommendation 5

Organisations could identify and explore factors that shape machine operator behaviour and contribute to production-safety tensions in the organisation by using a combination of surveys and interviews/focus groups. Deal with these underlying issues rather than focussing on resolving the tension directly. For example, redesign jobs to provide workers with adequate rest breaks and time for secondary work task, rather than penalising short-cuts and messy work environments directly, as rushing behaviours tend to be shaped by the broader organisational context rather than individual attitudes and beliefs around safety.

Recommendation 6

Further investigations are needed to understand the challenges faced by CALD and migrant workers. Engage with these vulnerable groups directly to understand the factors that contribute to reduced safety capability. It might be a matter of creating competencies for them in understanding safe work practices and their rights.

Recommendation 7

Follow-up investigations could also target young manufacturing workers, specifically, to understand more about their experiences working safely. Our data were in conflict, as quantitative measures purported that younger workers have more positive social experiences with safety, whereas some of our qualitative data suggested that younger workers are implicated in incidents due to inattention or overloading of their capabilities. The discrepancy between qualitative and quantitative data means that relying solely on survey information to research young worker safety is problematic and should be avoided.

Recommendation 8

Ongoing development of safety climate scales contextualised for industry could be undertaken to integrate the findings of this report and to re-operationalise safety climate into a measure that is more sensitive to underlying safety-production tensions.

View the full report (PDF, 1683.66 KB).