Since October 2021, construction firms in Saskatchewan have been invited by the Saskatchewan Construction Safety Association (SCSA) to use a short survey twice a year to measure perspectives and attitudes about health and safety priorities—i.e., the safety culture—within their organizations.
As described in a previous case study, the SCSA wanted to provide member firms with an easy way to measure and improve their health and safety performance, create industry-wide benchmarks, as well as help SCSA advisors target areas of needed improvement when they work with member firms.
The safety culture tool selected for this initiative was the Institute for Work & Health’s (IWH) Organizational Performance Metric (IWH-OPM), an eight-item questionnaire developed by IWH and Ontario’s prevention system partners. With the help of EHS Analytics, a Calgary-based firm that specializes in health and safety data, research and machine learning, the SCSA has been administering the IWH-OPM to SCSA members every six months since the start of the initiative. This case study captures how the SCSA and its members have used this data to improve their safety programs.
Participation is in the SCSA initiative is voluntary; SCSA members are encouraged to complete the survey at no cost. Members then get access to a dashboard that allows them to see their firm’s results for each of the eight survey items, their overall score and a guide to interpret these figures. They also receive an infographic with average industry results and trends over time, broken down by firm size and three subsectors (construction trades, residential, and commercial/industrial).
Wright Construction, which has its head office in Saskatoon and offices in Regina and Calgary, provides an example of how IWH-OPM survey results, made available through the SCSA initiative, have informed improvements to safety culture. When Bob Watson, Wright’s manager of health, safety and environment joined the company in 2022, he heard about the SCSA survey using the IWH-OPM. He thought it would be a useful way take a pulse check
on the safety culture at Wright.
The overall score for Wright Construction on the fall 2022 round of the survey was fairly good. But the score on one item—those who act safely receive positive recognition
—was lower than the others. Watson saw an opportunity to address this. He established a subcommittee of the joint health and safety committee (JHSC) to focus on recognition of strong safety practices. Several innovations were developed and implemented, including adding a recognition shout out
to the weekly toolbox talks and adding a section on positive observations to the safety inspection forms. The JHSC made several other changes, such as conducting inspections weekly instead of monthly and improving the process for field level hazard assessments
, a pre-task planning tool.
By the fall 2024 round of the safety culture survey, Wright had a marked improvement, not only on the question about recognition, but also in its overall score (the average score for the eight questions of the IWH-OPM). The safety culture survey helped us to identify things that we could improve, and we are seeing strong results from the changes that we put in place,
says Watson.
The SCSA, with the help of EHS Analytics, has been analysing all the data collected from all the safety culture surveys obtained from participating members. In August 2024, the SCSA published a paper by EHS Analytics on the analysis of data from the first six surveys. A total of 3,150 surveys were collected from 794 unique SCSA members. To achieve a better statistical representation, EHS Analytics filtered out firms with fewer than three employees and a participation rate below 10 per cent. The final dataset used for the analysis included 252 unique firms and 1,643 unique surveys. Key findings included the following:
- SCSA members that had obtained the Certificate of Recognition (COR®) had significantly higher (better) scores on the IWH-OPM than other respondents.
- Firms with a higher OPM score had a significantly lower lost-time injury rate (based on data from the Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board) over the six-month period after they were surveyed. COR-certified firms were filtered out of this analysis to avoid the mixed effect of COR-certification and IWH-OPM score. This finding suggests that the OPM score may serve as a leading indicator of safety outcomes among SCSA members.
The SCSA has also found the data from the IWH-OPM helpful in tailoring their outreach to their members. The OPM data have allowed us to distinguish between better and poorer performers
says Amber Huck, communications coordinator at the SCSA. This means that we can give the poorer performers practical advice on steps they can take to improve their safety culture and give the better performers advice on how to achieve continuous improvement. The data also allows us to pinpoint particular areas of safety culture that need the most attention. This enhances the quality of service we are able to provide to our member firms.
Since the survey is administered every six months, SCSA (as well as its participating member firms) is able to look at changes over time. We will be monitoring trends in the OPM data to see if we can document an improvement in safety culture over time,
says Edward Pyle, SCSA vice-president.
The use of the IWH-OPM by the SCSA and its member firms provides an example of how the products of IWH research, including tools like the IWH-OPM, can be used to inform health and safety practices in workplaces.