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Beyond the Plateau: Identifying Risky Workers
Beyond the Plateau: Identifying Risky Workers
20 January 2012
Salih Mujcic, Consulting Psychologist from Onetest explains how organisations can further improve safety metrics by understanding the attributes that predispose some individuals to act unsafely in this article published in the Summer Issue of the Australasian Mine Safety Journal.
The pressure to eliminate hazards, incidents and workplace accidents in high-risk environments continues to grow. Organisations behoved with this responsibility are not only challenged to work safer but also smarter within a competitive global economy. Add to this the backdrop of the new National Harmonisation of Australia’s Work Health and Safety legislation and it is easy to see that organisations operating with high-risk environments have received a significant call to action in terms of exercising their due diligence and managing every element that contributes to operational risk.
To meet these demands organisations have traditionally focused on those areas of the workplace over which they have the greatest amount of control; the working environment and equipment. As a result, they have been able to engineer out or contain risk through the provision of physical safeguards or systems.
However, some organisations have controlled for safety risks through environmental modification to such an extent that they are achieving little to no gains in safety outcomes. This plateau in safety outcomes becomes particularly pertinent when you consider the increasingly large investment in environmental control that is required for marginal improvements in safety outcomes.
In order to work smarter organisations are increasingly investing resources into an emerging area of risk mitigation: psychometric assessment. Numerous field studies have demonstrated the utility of psychometric assessment in managing risk. In fact, studies have shown that high-risk individuals are responsible for a disproportionate amount (over three times) of minor injuries and workplace accidents (e.g. falls, vehicular accidents and spills).
This article will explore how industry has responded to the ever-growing challenge of containing risk up to this point. In addition, the article will illustrate how organisations can further improve safety metrics by understanding the attributes that predispose some individuals to act unsafely, and how to harness the power of psychometric assessments to improve workplace safety.
Download the full article in PDF format.
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