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