The Health and Safety Index
The Health & Safety Index recently engaged a Murdoch University PhD to evaluate the psychometric properties of our online assessment tool.
The Health & Safety Index is a simple online assessment enabling organisations to talk with their workforce and receive feedback at scale. This helps target areas of focus to inform strategy and enable a high-performance culture. Even more important now, with an increasing remote workforce!
The survey takes less than 10 min. Unlike traditional surveys that often only cover safety culture, the Health and Safety Index covers four key aspects:
1. Safety Leadership
2. Safety Engagement
3. Health & Wellbeing
4. Safety Systems
Validation Review Results
The results of Health and Safety Index review involved n=471 participants and included:
– Reliability: Statistical reliability of aspects were evaluated to be α greater 0.90 or “excellent”. This is substantially higher compared to other common safety climate surveys1,2.
This reliability is particularly important when it comes to tracking and comparing results with past internal surveys and benchmarks from external sources.
– Key Finding: This study demonstrated a 0.86 positive correlation between separate Employee Engagement (n-20) vs Safety Engagement (n=20) questions.
– Levers: The outcomes of this study were also used to refine key levers for improving workplace health and safety across the four key aspects mentioned above.
Conclusion
The Health and Safety index aspects were evaluated as having a reliability of α > 0.90 or “excellent”.
High performance organisations should consider using WHS as a key component of improving employee engagement and visa-versa, e.g. WHS and Human Resource (HR) teams collaborating effectively to achieve common goals.
During the unprecedented times of personnel working remotely, the Health and Safety Index is a great way to engage the workforce at scale, receive feedback, and improve both WHS and employee engagement.
1. Kines P, Lappalainen J, Mikkelsen KL, Olsen E, Pousette A, Tharaldsen J, et al. Nordic safety climate questionnaire NOSACQ-50): A new tool for diagnosing occupational safety climate. Int J Ind Ergon. 2011;41:634-646
2. Cox SJ, Cheyne AJT. Assessing safety culture in offshore envi-ronments. Saf Sci. 2000;34:111-129