UGA pinpoints important factors in workplace safety

Each year in the U.S., about 6,000 workers die on the job, and millions are injured.

According to a recent University of Georgia study, authored by workplace safety depends on whether:

1.      workers think management emphasizes workplace safety; and
2.      business policies result in interference with family demands.

"We've known for some time that certain occupations are more dangerous than others due to a variety of physical and other hazards," said UGA professor Dave DeJoy. "But in the last 20 years, there has been growing evidence that management and organizational factors also play a critical role. That is, actions taken or not taken at the organizational level can either set the stage for injuries or help prevent them."

DeJoy coauthored the study  with Todd Smith, a recent graduate of the Health Promotion and Behavior doctoral program in the UGA College of Public Heallth.

They examined nine factors potentially affecting workplace safety: management-employee relations, participation, safety climate, work-family interference, job content, organizational effectiveness, advancement potential, resource adequacy and supervisor support.

"Most prior research on organizational factors has focused on single occupations or single organizations," says DeJoy. "There has been a clear need to examine these factors across a diverse array of occupations and employment circumstances."

A failure of management

In one of their more interesting findings, they determined that when a worker perceives his or her work environment as safe (as one where management emphasizes on-the-job safety), it can reduce injuries by as much 32 percent. Moreover, businesss that place minimal constraints on worker performance and that run in a smooth and effective manner can reduce injuries by 38 percent.

"Injury is a failure of management,” says DeJoy. “Organizations who blame individuals for injuries do not create a positive safety climate."

Smith, too, emphasized the organizational factor in safety: "We can design the best safety controls, but they must be maintained, and that falls on management. Enacted policies and procedures—not formalized ones but those acted upon—define a climate of safety."

Home-workplace safety conflicts

The study also found that conflict between family and job demands can increase injuries by as much as 37 percent.

"We used to think work was one thing and family was another,” says DeJoy, “but now there is a realization that work-life balance affects performance and productivity."

The results of the study were published online in January in a paper entitled up “Occupational Injury in America: An analysis of risk factors using data from the General Social Survey (GSS)’ and will appear in the March issue of the Journal of Safety Research.

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