Without question, the most important element in lowering safety-related costs is attitude. For a safety program to work as it should, management and personnel must have the attitude that safety matters.

Evidence of this was recently found by researchers from Washington State University. They discovered that employees are less likely to underreport accidents if they work for companies where safety is stressed, or for direct supervisors with a pro-safety attitude.

The study—which included 1,379 employees from 35 enterprises—revealed that the average number of accidents reported (1.47 per employee) was much lower than the real number of accidents (3.43 per employee). Reporting all accidents is a safety best practice, so this underreporting is a problem.

The good news is that for companies with a pro-safety attitude and safety-minded supervisors, there was virtually no gap between reported and actual accidents.

"Underreporting was nearly nonexistent when employees had a supervisor with strong safety leadership skills and also were working in an organization with a positive safety climate," WSU professor Tahira M. Probst told Human Resource Executive Online.

"The highest rates of underreporting were only seen when neither were present," said Probst, who authored the report on the study. "This indicates to me that there are multiple opportunities and possible interventions for reducing underreporting of injuries at the supervisor and organization levels."

The risk of underreporting is that it gives an inaccurate picture of a company’s safety level and fails to identify areas that need improvement. When an accident occurs and isn’t reported because there was no major damage or no one was seriously hurt, similar accidents are likely to continue occurring—until there is an accident that results in significant costs, and possibly serious injuries.

Why does underreporting most often happen? Because it’s easier in the short term. Until companies and supervisors understand that the short-term benefits are outweighed by the long-term negative impacts of poor safety, accident reporting probably won’t be adequately enforced.

We see the same dynamic in many companies’ inspection processes. Personnel who don’t feel like their company or supervisor place a value on safety are far more likely to “pencil whip” inspections. Inspections may be required, but they aren’t being done well, and these companies are missing out on the potential of proper inspections to make operations safer and more efficient.

Conversely, personnel who work for companies or supervisors who have the right safety attitude almost always do inspections properly, often aided by tools such as The Checker, which is in itself evidence of management’s pro-safety attitude.

The Bottom Line

Safety best practices—whether its reporting all accidents or insisting on proper inspections—don’t just happen. They require an attitude that safety should never be sacrificed to short cuts.

To read the Human Resource Executive Online article by Kecia Bal about the WSU study, click here.

 Image courtesy of Fernando de Sousa, Creative Commons.