Research Project-Week Five

Article: Safety Culture Assessment and its Relationship with Accidents in a Dam Construction Project.

The article aims to address the safety culture assessments of a specific workplace. The article looks at how accidents that occur in the dam site relate with the safety culture assessments. Safety culture assessment requires an organization or an enterprise identifying all the hindrances that prevent workers of an organization from having good performances in the workplace. Safety culture assessment measures the dam workers’ perceptions about how effective the safety culture of the dam project management group. The safety culture assessment acts as a report for the dam project management on the major and minor safety issues that warrant their attention. The safety culture assessment also looks to find all the hindrances that exist in the dam project and ways to improve any safety issues.

Safety culture assessment provides a benchmark for safety measures project sites use and how efficient and effective they are. The assessment offers a platform for comparison between one project site and another. The safety assessment culture provides a way which employees or workers use to voice their concerns, state problems and commend the project management on issues concerning the safety at the workplace or project site. Project sites are prone to accidents. The dam project management ignores the safety culture. When the management does not take keen consideration on improving employee safety coupled with ignorance of safety culture, the number of accidents at the project sites and workplace increase. Safety culture assessment uses four tools. The four safety assessment tools include; safety culture survey, safety management systems evaluation, structured interviews and leadership evaluation and development for safety assessment tools.

Article Research Question

What is the cause of the accidents that occur within the dam construction sites? The article seeks to find out the reasons behind the accidents that occur within the dam construction sites.

Background Research

A complete safety culture assessment could reveal the causes of accidents at the construction site of the dam. A complete safety culture assessment uses all four tools to do a complete assessment.

Safety Culture Survey

The safety culture survey looks at several factors that account for safety at the workplace. The safety culture survey assesses how the project management supports safety regulations, how fellow workers support for safety, personal responsibility for safety and the safety systems in place (Taylor, 2012).

Safety Management Systems Evaluation

The safety management systems evaluation looks at ten different systems safety management uses. Safety management systems involve evaluation of the leadership’s commitment to safety, the discipline, rewards, and recognition. Safety management systems also look at observation, feedback, safety communication, safety accountability, audits, inspections, safety policies, procedures, safety committees, incident reporting and subsequent investigations (Taylor, 2012).

Structured Interviews

Interviews are carried out with questions that relate to safety policies and issues at the project site (Taylor, 2012).

Leadership Evaluation and Development for Safety Assessment (LEADS)

The LEADS assessment tool measures the critical leadership skills that safety requires. The tool looks at how effectively leaders of the project consider safety (Taylor, 2012).

A complete assessment reveals the various causes of accidents at the dam.

The Article’s Hypothesis

The hypothesis of the article is that there is a direct co-relation between accidents occurring at the dam construction sites and the safety culture. The article seeks to prove that poor safety culture directly leads to accidents occurring in the dam construction sites. The alternative hypothesis would, therefore, be there is no relationship between safety culture and the accidents that occur at the dam construction site (Daryshi, 2015).

Ethical Concerns

The ethical concerns in the study are concerned with the tools used in the safety assessment. In the interviews concerning safety issues, workers could be trained to answer questions to avoid making the leaders of the project look bad. Avoiding the true answers compromises the study. Another ethical concern is that there are not enough qualified project managers to ensure safety culture assessment is implemented properly. It is important to educate the project managers on safety policies and safety culture (Hanizzam Awang, 2016).

Preliminary Research Design

For the research data is collected using observation of the workplace safety measures put in place, interviews with the workers and project managers and submission of questionnaires to the employees and project leaders. All questionnaires and interviews will have questions that relate to safety concerns, policies and issues at the dam construction site.

Data Sampling for Research

The data sampling is done by using at least two workers from every level of the dam construction site. Data sampling ensures there is a wide range of data which improves the quality and accuracy of results.

References