Personality: The Missing Component in Safety
In the U.S. alone, injured employees cost organisations nearly $1 billion per week in direct and indirect costs. In the U.S. alone, injured employees cost organisations nearly $1 billion per week1 in worker compensation, medical expenses, lost productivity, and costs associated with absenteeism and low morale, among others. That number that is especially staggering considering companies spend equally large sum developing programs and procedures to keep their workers safe. The problem lies in the programs’ focus; traditional safety initiatives focus on training individuals and installing safer equipment, but they ignore the overwhelming cause of workplace injury: human error. Some traditional safety models are designed to engineer the
human element out of the process. Free of human interference, the thinking follows, a well-designed system can operate without incident. Although good engineering is a critical component of any safety program, even well designed systems unexpectedly fail – evidenced most recently by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s partial meltdown after sustaining damage during a natural disaster. When systems fail, it is critical to have people who can manage and make good decisions. Other safety programs focus more on establishing procedures and guidelines and training employees. Although establishing and reinforcing safety protocol is critical, overreliance on procedure is also reliance on employees following those procedures. Under stressful or boring circumstances, certain people are predisposed to make bad decisions regardless of guidelines or training. Both of these types of traditional methods neglect to acknowledge the contribution employees, and their personalities, make to the equation, and, as a result, continue to have
limited results developing a safetybased organisational culture. PERSONALITY & SAFETY To help organisations understand how personality influences safety-related behaviour, Hogan built the Hogan Safety Assessment, a competency model combining expert review of safety predictors and empirical evidence from more than 30 years of research. Each of the six competencies on the Hogan Safety Assessment was developed to define safety behaviors across all organizations, industries, and jobs.
• Compliant – Willingness to follow rules and procedures.
• Strong – Stress tolerance. • Cheerful – Maintaining emotional control.
• Vigilant – Remaining focused over time.
• Cautious – Avoiding risky actions. • Trainable – Engage in training and development. Candidates who score higher on these six competencies are more likely to behave safely at work. This predictive THE SCIENCE OF PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: THE MISSING COMPONENT IN SAFETY
Traditional safety models overlook the contributions of employees. Very few programs focus on the individual attributes of employees and how their innate personality characteristics can impact the system. power allows organisations to more thoroughly examine candidates and significantly increase the quality of hire. ASSESSMENTS IN USE Dayton Freight pioneered the use of Hogan’s assessments to predict safe behavior in its driver population, and was a major contributor of criterion evidence used to validate components of the Hogan Safety Assessment. Dayton Freight operates in 11 Midwestern states and employs more than 2,200 workers. Director of Risk Management Bill Durstock says Dayton began using the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) as part of its general hiring process.
Durstock says Dayton began to see a correlation between certain HPI scales and safety-oriented behaviour characteristics, particularly among truck drivers. Adjustment, for example, measures confidence, self-esteem, and composure under pressure; these are important characteristics in truck drivers, who are faced regularly with stressful situations like road construction, breakdowns, traffic jams and customer issues. Prudence concerns self-discipline, responsibility, and conscientiousness, which in turn reflect a driver’s ability to obey rules and procedures, adhere to posted speed limits and other traffic laws, and to follow customer procedures.
With this discovery, the HPI became a key part of Dayton’s hiring process. Positive and negative observations among current drivers are tracked and documented by independent monitors. Drivers with negative observations are coached privately, using Hogan feedback. “Our drivers are our biggest asset and our best sales people,” Durstock said. “They can also be our biggest liability if we don’t hire properly.” It was Dayton Freight’s work using Hogan’s assessments to predict safety that ultimately led to the development of the dedicated Hogan Safety Assessment.
“We wanted to do a better job of finding qualified candidates, and to increase “We felt there had to be a better our overall batting average,” he said. mousetrap,” Durstock said.
RESULTS In a 3.5-year study involving more than 3,500 observations, Dayton found that the drivers observing posted speed limits increased from 10% to a consistent level of 20-30%. Additionally, the percentage of drivers observed exceeding the speed limit by one or more miles per hour above posted limits fell from 90% to between 70-80% during the same period. The same study indicated a decrease in drivers exceeding the speed limit by more than five miles per hour from 70% to between 3040% over a six-month period. Continuous improvement in safety protocol plays a key role in developing safe organisations like Dayton Freight. As accidents occur, post-accident investigations often lead to better understanding of process improvement and new ways of doing a job more safely. CREATING A SAFETY CULTURE Although hiring the right people is the first step toward creating a safer work environment, to be successful, safety programs must be comprehensive. Companies must engage employees and create a culture of safety awareness that reaches from the lowest employee to the C-suite. Personality measurement is a key predictor of employees’ attitudes and dispositions toward safety.
1
Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety,
2008
THE SCIENCE OF PERSONALITY