Validating The Safety Measurement Culture Survey: Assessing Employee Safety Reporting

Organizations are increasingly using data and the outcome of data analysis to make decisions. However, certain organizational practices may reduce the value of the data, thereby hindering the decisions made based on analytics. The safety measurement culture of an organization, which we define as the culture of an organization around collecting, recording, and using data, arguably plays a large role in determining the quality of data. Accordingly, if organizations can improve their safety measurement culture, their data may more accurately represent behaviors occurring in their facilities and decisions based on data analytics will become more valuable. To assess employee perceptions that impact data quality, a Safety Measurement Culture Survey was developed to assess factors impacting employee participation and management action in promoting safety measurement. This study examines the tool’s criterion-related validity by assessing the relationship between the results of the survey and actual employee reporting, such as near misses and minor injuries, in an organization. The results of this study indicate that questions 6 (My supervisor encourages employees to participate in decisions that affect safety), 11 (I help investigate safety incidents and near misses) and 15 (When we report safety issues it helps prevent potentially serious injuries), on the survey are significantly correlated with the aforementioned outcomes of the companies in our study. This study also measures the content validity of the safety measurement culture survey by assessing the relationships between average survey response and number of incidents. The results from this analysis indicate a positive relationship with the average survey response and number of incidents of the companies in our study.