Assessment of Safety Climate within Food Manufacturing Facilities
An internationally acknowledged way of measuring safety at work is through the concept of "safety climate". Safety climate entered the field of occupational safety research with the landmark work of Dov Zohar1. Over the last 35 years, the concept has developed as an approach for measuring the level of safety in organizations. “It concerns managerial priorities towards safety, effects of safe conduct on organizational promotion, perceived status of safety managers, perceived effects of safe conduct on social status in the organization, perceived effectiveness and importance of safety training, the risk level at the workplace and the perceived effectiveness of enforcement versus guidance in promoting safety”1. Safety climate perceptions refer to those attributes of policy, procedures and practices that indicate the priority of safety in an organization compared to other goals, i.e. the priorities of competing goals as perceived by workers.
This is a follow-up to a study which found that Ontario food processing workplaces often failed to meet the requirements of the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act2. The goal of the current study is to understand why there were instances of non-compliance by determining the safety climate of food processing workplaces. Safety climate is your perception of management’s commitment to workplace health and safety as well as workers’ involvement in workplace health and safety. Safety climate is an individual attribute composed of two factors: management’s commitment to safety and workers’ involvement in safety
Study participants will complete a questionnaire (either online or paper-based). The questionnaire will ask general questions about the workplace, the attitude of the organization’s management towards health and safety as well as the attitude of employees towards health and safety.
Once complete, WSPS will share the results of this study. Keep checking this space for more updates.
References:
- Zohar D. (1980) Safety climate in industrial organizations: theoretical and applied implications. Journal of Applied Psychology 65(1), 96-102.
- Fairclough. C, and Hon. C. (2017). Occupational Health and Safety Legislative Gap Analysis of the Food Processing Sector in Ontario. Journal of Safety, Health & Environmental Research 13(1), p.338-344.
