B1 | Factors impacting safety voice intentions of young workers | Rapid research 20 mins
Tracks
Track B | Virtual
| Monday, July 4, 2022 |
| 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
| Virtual conference venue |
Overview
Virtual simulated +
Presenter
Dr Neil Kirby
The University of Adelaide
Factors impacting safety voice intentions of young workers
10:30 AM - 10:50 AMPromotional description
Many of us will remember what it is like to join the workforce. Sink or swim, trial by fire, being thrown into the deep end are metaphors that may come to mind! Securing your first job marks a significant life transition and brings with it some long awaited financial independence. But becoming a worker is also accompanied by challenges – new tasks to learn, new rules to follow, new co-workers to get to know, a workplace culture to adapt to – and for many young workers their new job holds a greater risk of them being physically or emotionally injured at work than their older co-workers. Inexperience, lack of training, fear of speaking up are all contributors to this increased risk. This presentation examines factors related to the individual, their work team, the organisation, and external environment that hinder or promote young worker use of their safety voice to speak up about work safety and provides recommendations to improve young worker safety and wellbeing.
Learning outcomes
The importance of speaking up about work safety (safety voice) is of particular concern in young workers, whom research has shown are more at risk of work injuries and whose working conditions, including more casual and part-time employment, can act to dissuade them from raising work safety concerns. An understanding of factors that impede safety voice can serve as a basis for interventions that encourage rather than dissuade use of safety voice. Many of these interventions are within the expertise of Organisational Psychologists, including monitoring and improving the work safety climate, providing team training that facilitates social support, and safety induction and training that explicitly addresses the issue of safety voice and ways it can be supported. Such changes, like all successful organisational changes, require overt top management support, champions of change that implement and maintain those changes, and buy-in from those whose safety voice needs to be heard.
Author(s)
Kirby Neil; Harris, Julia; Robinson Cathryn
.....
Dr Neil Kirby is an Adjunct Senior Lecture and Director of the Wellbeing Research Unit in the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide. His research interests include disability and organisational psychology. Recent research projects associated with the Wellbeing Research Unit and conducted in collaboration with Dr Julia Harries in this research unit include the evaluation of a social skills training program for children with autism and its application in a school setting, the evaluation of the quality of life of people with disabilities relocated from an institutional environment to community residential settings, and using a work safety climate measure to identify work safety issues of Disability Support Workers and evaluate the outcomes of implemented strategies to improve their work safety. Dr Kirby currently supervises Masters and PhD research theses in the areas of disability and organisational psychology. He has co-authored books on Organisational Psychology and Organisational Culture.
