Toronto • May 28-29, 2010 • Student Day and Workshops: May 27
Paper: Developing leading indicators of organizational performance in Ontario
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Day/Time: Saturday at 11:15
Room: Armoury Suite, 2nd Floor
Objectives:
Current occupational health and safety systems use lagging indicators, injuries and illnesses, to manage system performance. Recently, OHSCO tasked a group composed of safety professionals from Ontario Health and Safety Associations (HSAs), the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), the Ministry of Labour (MOL) with the assistance of the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) to develop a safety culture measure. The group was to develop a short, easy-to-use measure that could be used by HSA safety consultants in their meetings with clients that could be linked to injury and illness claim data by IWH. In this presentation, we report on the developed measure and its relationship to injury and illness data.
Methods:
The develop took place over a one-year period and resulted in an 8-item measure of organizational indices. Data were then collected from 100 firms in each of 8 HSAs from equal numbers of small (less than 20 employees) and medium and large (greater than 20 employees) firms and firms classified by the WSIB as high risk and low risk using the current risk classification scheme. Firms were not sampled; instead HSAs attempted to get 100 firms in a convenience sample. In total, data was collected from 808 firms in 2009. Both classic psychometric (Cronbach alpha and exploratory factor structure) and concurrent validity (using 3-year average injury and illness claim data – 2006-2008) analysis is based on 584 firms after duplicate firms and respondents with no firm number to link to WSIB data were removed. Validity analyses used a negative binomial regression. All analyses were done using SAS.
Results:
The 8-item measure captured 8 questions HSA consultants considered to have face validity and that firm management could accurately report. The items were based on practical experience; items used in other on-going surveys in the HSAs and could be observed. The 8 items measured: formal safety audits at regular intervals are a normal part of our business, everyone at this organization values ongoing safety improvement in this organization, this organization considers safety at least as important as production and quality in the way work is done, workers and supervisors have the information they need to work safely, employees are always involved in decisions affecting their health and safety, those in charge of safety have the authority to make the changes they have identified as necessary, those who act safely receive positive recognition, everyone has the tools and/or equipment they need to complete their work safely. The Cronbach’s alpha is 0.88 for the scale and all items load on a single factor. The responses were invariant by firm size and who responded from within the firm. Analyses of the relationship of the 8 item scale to injuries and illness claims in the past 3 years is in the right direction but it not statistically significant after adjustment for firm size and health and safety association.
Conclusions:
The current work shows that work and health researchers can collaborate with key stakeholders to develop a usable psychometrically sound leading indicator metric. While the current metric has not been shown to be associated with historical firm claim experiences – this should not be considered a strong validity test. Furthermore, firm selection may have affected the results. The collaborative activity has led to a large benchmarking initiative in the Provence base.
