In response to Richard’s observation about the annual survey of employees’ view of management commitment to safety, I must say that my experience was quite different as to the reasons the responses quickly moved to uniformly excellent. Where I was, these surveys were not limited to commitment to safety, but to all elements of management effectiveness, broken out in categories and examined through numerous questions.  Managers did not tell the employees they were wrong. They assigned the employees to committees to fix the identified shortcomings, or recommend fixes if the identified problem was higher than their second-level manager. Work on those committees was difficult, time consuming, took people away from their primary tasks that they wanted to accomplish.  It was openly discussed that the way to avoid those boondoggles was to answer every question with “good” or “excellent”.  Even selecting the neutral option that was always offered was interpreted by the assessment system as a negative response.

If everything has to be great, then nothing is good enough.

Peter Zavon, MS, CIH
Penfield, NY

PZAVON**At_Symbol_Here**Rochester.rr.com

My problem with articles that draw conclusions from surveys is that the data in is often, at least in my opinion, inaccurate or just plain wrong.

I routinely see safety audits that reveal gapping holes in safety programs even though the organization ranks their performance in these areas as good to excellent. My personal experience with academic research laboratories is that while safety awareness is getting better it certainly is far from as good as that found in most industrial research laboratories. And many of them still routinely over estimate the effectiveness of their programs.

Years ago I worked for an organization that annually surveyed all its members on management’s commitment to safety. Within a few years the results were almost uniformly excellent. Why? Because every time a group expressed anything less the manager assured them they were wrong and encouraged them to rethink their answer next year. Everyone rapidly got the message. In another organization my comments on their awful MOC process was challenged by an internal survey that ranked it highly. My reply was to note that several individuals had volunteered that they loved the new system because it did not ask them to do much work to get an approval like the old system.

So a good article but you will pardon my skepticism about treating surveys like real data.

--- For more information about the DCHAS-L e-mail list, contact the Divisional membership chair at membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org Follow us on Twitter **At_Symbol_Here**acsdchas

--- For more information about the DCHAS-L e-mail list, contact the Divisional membership chair at membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org Follow us on Twitter **At_Symbol_Here**acsdchas