Exploring Worker Experience as a Predictor of Routine and Non-routine Safety Performance Outcomes in the Mining Industry

Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Hoebbel ◽  
Emily J. Haas ◽  
Margaret E. Ryan
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1145-1154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Stemn ◽  
Maureen E. Hassall ◽  
Carmel Bofinger ◽  
David Cliff

Safety ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Stemn ◽  
Carmel Bofinger ◽  
David Cliff ◽  
Maureen Hassall

Effective incident investigations have been recognised as a vital means of improving safety. Nevertheless, there has been little attempt to link incident investigations to actual safety performance. In this study, a framework for assessing the maturity of incident investigations and identifying areas for improvements is described. The framework was developed based on a literature review and interviews with 41 investigators across five large-scale Ghanaian gold mines. The framework consists of 20 elements across four dimensions and five maturity levels. The dimensions (investigator competencies, system of investigation, stages of investigation and post-investigation findings) consider the most relevant aspects of practical investigation and for each dimension, elements that are more specific were defined across five maturity levels. Mapping the interview data collected from five mines into a maturity framework highlighted that the mines occupied different positions on the framework. Some occupied the advanced levels consistently and others consistently occupied the lower levels. Applying the interview data to the framework also identified priority areas for improvement. Finally, the maturity scores derived from mapping interview data onto the framework were correlated with the incidence rates of the mines to determine if any relationship existed between the two variables. The low incidence rate mines had higher maturity scores and the high incidence rate mines had lower maturity scores. It was found that the method was effective in practice, giving clear indications of areas where improvements are needed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 174-177 ◽  
pp. 2729-2733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Na Guo ◽  
Shi Wang Yu

Construction is the second dangerous industry in China, which is preceded only by mining industry. Thus it’s necessary and urgent to ensure workers safety due to the specialty of the dangerous industry. Improving the safety performance of construction workers could be an efficient and reliable way to ensure their safety in China. Literatures related to safety performance, safety climate, safety behavior, personal issues and safety evaluation were reviewed. Based on this, a conception model for the workers safety performance improvement was then proposed and analyzed.


Safety ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily J. Haas ◽  
Brianna Eiter ◽  
Cassandra Hoebbel ◽  
Margaret E. Ryan

A debate exists about the impact of mineworker experience on health and safety (H&S). Studies often assert that length of time on the job (tenure) is negatively associated with accidents (i.e., new employees have a higher accident rate). However, inferences are all made based on reported incidents, whereas we know that underreporting is a problem in high-risk occupations. To that end, this study sought to examine how worker experience may impact a variety of H&S outcomes on the job. Comprised of three separate case studies with different H&S outcome variables, researchers broke down the results of several data sets that were collected from 3400 miners who worked in either underground coal, surface sand, stone, and gravel, or metal/non-metal to reveal any underlying trends among differing levels of experience on a specific job, with a specific company, and in the mining industry. Each case study is described in turn, using Kruskall-Wallis tests to determine the impact miners’ experience on hazard recognition accuracy (Case 1), self-escape confidence (Case 2), and safety compliance (Case 3). The results show that workers with more job experience possess higher levels of perceived health and safety skills, including the identification of hazards on the job. We discuss the impact of experience on several predictors of incidents, including perceived job knowledge and hazard identification, and perceived compliance on the job. Practitioners can expect to gain a greater understanding of their workforce, including actual differences and similarities to consider, when communicating pieces of their health and safety management system to training workers of all experience levels.


Author(s):  
Abdulrazak O. Balogun ◽  
Stephanie A. Andel ◽  
Todd D. Smith

Employee turnover has been linked to negative business performance outcomes, increased costs, and disruptions to operations. Research to explore predictors of turnover intention is important to the mining industry, including the stone, sand, and gravel mining (SSGM) industry. Safety climate has been linked to job satisfaction and reductions in turnover intention in other fields, but investigation within SSGM has virtually been non-existent, creating a knowledge gap. This research seeks to address this dearth of information. Cross-sectional data from 452 workers in the SSGM industry were analyzed to assess the influence of safety climate on turnover intention through job satisfaction. Mediation analyses showed that job satisfaction significantly mediated the relationship between safety climate and turnover intention. The implications of these novel findings are important for SSGM administrators. It suggests that bolstering safety programs and increasing safety climate perceptions will help increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover intention among workers in the SSGM industry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Haifei Yang ◽  
Yao Wu ◽  
Huihui Xiao ◽  
Yi Zhao

Driving safety is considered to have a strong relationship with traffic flow characteristics. However, very few studies have addressed the safety impacts in the three-phase traffic theory that has been demonstrated to be an advancement in explaining the empirical features of traffic flow. Another important issue affecting safety is driver experience heterogeneity, especially in developing countries experiencing a dramatic growth in the number of novice drivers. Thus, the primary objective of the current study is to develop a microsimulation environment for evaluating safety performance considering the presence of novice drivers in the framework of three-phase theory. First, a car-following model is developed by incorporating human physiological factors into the classical Intelligent Driver Model (IDM). Moreover, a surrogate safety measure based on the integration concept is modified to evaluate rear-end crashes in terms of probability and severity simultaneously. Based on a vehicle-mounted experiment, the field data of car-following behavior are collected by dividing the subjects into a novice group and an experienced group. These data are used to calibrate the proposed car-following model to explain driver experience heterogeneity. The results indicate that our simulation environment is capable of reproducing the three-phase theory, and the changes in the modified surrogate safety measure are highly correlated with traffic phases. We also discover that the presence of novice drivers leads to different safety performance outcomes across various traffic phases. The effect of driver experience heterogeneity is found to increase the probability of the rear-end crashes as well as the corresponding severity. The results of this study are expected to provide a scientific understanding of the mechanisms of crash occurrences and to provide application suggestions for improving traffic safety performance.


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