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Health & Safety Index: Validation Review

The Health and Safety Index

The Health & Safety Index recently engaged a Murdoch University PhD to evaluate the psychometric properties of our online assessment tool.

The Health & Safety Index is a simple online assessment enabling organisations to talk with their workforce and receive feedback at scale. This helps target areas of focus to inform strategy and enable a high-performance culture. Even more important now, with an increasing remote workforce!

The survey takes less than 10 min. Unlike traditional surveys that often only cover safety culture, the Health and Safety Index covers four key aspects:

1. Safety Leadership

2. Safety Engagement

3. Health & Wellbeing

4. Safety Systems

Validation Review Results

The results of Health and Safety Index review involved n=471 participants and included:

Reliability: Statistical reliability of aspects were evaluated to be greater 0.90 or “excellent”. This is substantially higher compared to other common safety climate surveys1,2.  

Key Finding: This study demonstrated a 0.86 positive correlation between separate Employee Engagement (n-22) vs Safety Engagement (n=22) questions.

Levers: The outcomes of this study identified eleven “Levers” that can be uniquely measured in each survey report to help organisations target specific areas of focus.

Conclusion

The Health and Safety index aspects were evaluated as having a reliability of >0.90 or “excellent”.  

High performance organisations should consider using WHS as a key component of improving employee engagement and visa-versa, e.g. WHS and Human Resource (HR) teams collaborating effectively to achieve common goals.

During the unprecedented times of personnel working remotely, the Health and Safety Index is a great way to engage the workforce at scale, receive feedback, and improve both WHS and employee engagement.

Additional Research and Resources

Refer to the Health and Safety Index Research and Resources page to obtain more information and evidence.

1. Kines P, Lappalainen J, Mikkelsen KL, Olsen E, Pousette A, Tharaldsen J, et al. Nordic safety climate questionnaire NOSACQ-50): A new tool for diagnosing occupational safety climate. Int J Ind Ergon. 2011;41:634-646

2. Cox SJ, Cheyne AJT. Assessing safety culture in offshore envi-ronments. Saf Sci. 2000;34:111-129