REGINA – Almost 800 construction companies participated in an industry survey designed to predict injuries and enhance Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) performance administered by the (SCSA) and .
OHS and SCSA report it is the largest survey of its kind administered at an industry scale and that the tool has proven to be an effective leading indicator for safety performance.
The survey tool uses the Institute for Work & Health Organizational Performance Metric (IWH-OPM), an eight-item questionnaire developed by IWH to assess values and beliefs around safety within workplace culture.
The large-scale participation of the Saskatchewan construction industry provided data collected over three years, through six rounds of the survey. EHS analyzed the data to gain insights and further support the industry’s safety efforts.
Key findings include:
- A strong correlation between high survey scores and lower future lost time injury rates.
- Identification of areas where safety improvements can significantly reduce injury risks.
- Enhanced ability for firms to benchmark their safety performance against industry standards and peers.
- Confirmation of the effectiveness of COR® certification.
- Shortcomings in Canadian OHS performance are not highly related to a lack of tools or equipment.
“Our analysis has proven that the Safety Culture Survey is a true leading indicator of safety performance,” said MK, Data Science Team Lead at EHS Analytics. “Finding easy-to-measure, effective leading indicators in safety is incredibly challenging, and the Safety Culture Survey provides companies with the ability to foresee and mitigate potential hazards before they result in incidents. Leading indicators are often considered the 'Holy Grail' in safety for predicting risk, and this tool achieves that goal.”
Every SCSA member company is invited to participate in the survey and view their results in a custom analytics dashboard. Companies can see how their score compares to peers, find follow-up questions to make proactive adjustments to their safety program and monitor their performance over time.
“Having insights into one’s own company in a way that can predict incidents is a game changer,” said SCSA President Collin Pullar. “We encourage all of our members to utilize this simple but insightful culture survey to better understand where they are doing well, but also better recognize and address weakness in their culture to prevent potential injuries. This is a powerful Canadian-built tool and we would love to see as many companies as possible use it, and learn from it to prevent accidents within their workforces.”
“At the Institute for Work & Health, our mission is to conduct and mobilize research that supports policy-makers, employers and workers in creating healthy, safe and inclusive work environments,” says Dr. Peter Smith, president of IWH. “To that end, it is heartening to see health and safety organizations such as the SCSA use the IWH-OPM to both understand organizational health and safety practices over time, and to better understand the relationships between these practices and safety outcomes in Saskatchewan.”
The survey is delivered twice a year to SCSA members, each fall and spring. The next round begins on Sept. 23, 2024.
