Safety climate represents employees’ shared perceptions of the value an organisation places on safety. Frequently safety climate measures are lengthy in order to comprehensively assess critical work safety factors, which makes their completion time consuming, particularly when used in conjunction with other work or performance measures. Consequently, many organisations only employ such measures during or after a safety crisis. This compromises their usefulness as a leading work safety indicator for identifying and remediating emerging safety issues before they become critical. This study demonstrated a procedurally sound and practically efficient item reduction method, combining both statistical and practical methodological procedures to develop a brief safety climate measure for the purpose of regular monitoring and remediation of safety issues. Results support the usefulness of this brief organisational safety climate measure for both practice and research purposes.

Ideally at the conclusion of the presentation participants will have a greater understanding of work safety climate and its usefulness as a leading indicator for safety outcomes. This will benefit participants’ in terms of improving knowledge of the discipline and also potential intervention strategies to remediate safety concerns before they reach a critical stage. It is anticipated that participants will develop a wider understanding of practically-focused item-reduction techniques that can supplement the traditional statistical focus. The present study demonstrated how a well-established comprehensive work safety measure can be reduced to a brief practical version by using not only statistical techniques but also practitioner opinion across a range of industries, and a measure of readability to ensure workers completing the measure fully comprehend all items. It is hoped that presentation participants will understand the value of incorporating safety practitioners into the development of safety measures to bridge the research-practitioner gap.

Summers, Denvar S; Sarris, Aspa; Harries, Julia A; Kirby, Neil H.