Here are some simple questions. Were you tested for illegal drugs before your employment? Do you understand how the cost of accidents affects your company’s profits? Have you received enough training to effectively perform your job?
Your confidential and anonymous answers to 36 questions like these paint a picture of your entire company, when they are combined with those of all of your colleagues, the staff you manage, and your managers.
They can show where there are communication and expectation gaps between the beliefs of executive management, operations management, supervision and skilled craft employees.
The technique uses the same principle as police questioning suspects individually, and comparing their stories. Ask a senior manager: is safety important to you? Ask field staff: do you feel senior management thinks safety is important? Their responses may not be the same. Nor might executives and supervisors answer the following questions the same way:
Do you understand how the cost of accidents affects your company’s profits?
Does your supervisor insist on prompt medical attention for every employee? Do you respect your supervisor as a leader?
Researchers compare the results; any questions with less than 70% yes votes are noted; any questions with less than 60% are red-flagged for investigation. A disparity of 15% between the answers of employee groups – operations management compared to supervisors, for example – indicates that there are misperceptions, gaps, in the company’s safety programme.
Although the survey is carried out by insurer Zurich, it does not make any promises about reducing the premiums of companies who go through the process, says Forrest Ropp, senior risk engineer. “We want to incentivise safe operations. If we can help you improve, you are more attractive to work at, more professional, and more competitive. Insurance rates are outside of that.”
Once a company’s gaps are identified, many improvements can be made.
“Say that there is a gap in the perception of employees about whether they are encouraged to be actively involved in safety – the management thinks they are, the craft employees think they are not. You can make that part of a supervisor’s management responsibilities, and set up safety committees, for example, or encourage employees to survey fellow employees about where they see problems in safety.”
Zurich risk engineering manager Daniel Buswell adds: “This is a perception survey. Communication is the problem – and how it is delivered and received.”
The final report prepared by Zurich recommends how to improve the company’s safety and performance. “We will work with customers to figure out how to best implement the changes,” says Buswell. “If we delivered the report and left it, I don’t think that would offer value. Part of the goal is to effect change.”
Ropp says that the process is not suitable for every company. “The results might be surprising, and we want to be sure that a company is willing to take that on. The responses are not really disputable. The company needs to have a desire to improve, and Southern Industrial had that.”
Raleigh, North Carolina-based firm Southern Industrial Contractors was first contacted to take part by Zurich in October 2007. “It is a really unique survey, and helps make sure everyone’s on the same page,” says vice president of safety and risk management Phil Hooper.
The first round of surveys to the company’s 500 staff were sent out in December. Unfortunately a low response rate forced the company to send out a second mailing in February.
“Our employees are spread out over the southeast USA; some report to the same place every day, some are all over the place. When they get mail, it is easy to put it aside, throw it away, or forget about it. Because there were no names on it, we can’t say, ‘John Smith didn’t fill out his survey,'” Hooper says.
“The way it was told to me is, if you do it right, and get a high enough return, it will actually mean something. But if there is a low turn-out, it is not worth the effort. So it is critical that you get good numbers, and good data.”
Hooper expects to get the full results in April. “It is an opportunity to make the safety quality of the business better, but I don’t anticipate we will have to drop everything to fix it. It will probably reveal stuff that we already realised, where we can feel that something is not right, but where we don’t know how quite how bad, or good, it is.”
Southern Industrial uses Zurich for its general liability, automobile and workers’ compensation insurance, Hooper says. Zurich paid for the safety audit.
“The game plan is, based on results, identify the areas of improvement, and come back at a later time to see if we have closed the gaps,” Hooper says.
Zurich employs US management consultancy CM-Services to run the process. CM-Services adapted the process, which was developed by the US Government in the 1950s, to the construction industry.
