Improving Workplace Safety
Central to the success of any business is the ability to improve workplace safety by identifying, recruiting and promoting productive, safety conscious and dependable employees. SHL works with leading organisations to help them overcome business issues, like Health and Safety risks and absenteeism, which can result from hiring inappropriate staff.
Dependability and safety concerns
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) estimates the cost to UK business of work related accidents at £3.9 billion - £7.8 billion, with over 36 million working days lost on an annual basis. It is estimated that approximately 70% of accident causation in industrial environments can be attributed to human factors (HSE – Key statistics 2006/2007).
Further evidence of the necessity of improving workplace safety comes from The United States Department of Labor, who found that US businesses spend $170 billion a year on costs associated with occupational injuries and illnesses. However, it also found that workplaces that established safety and health management systems were able to reduce their injury and illness costs by 20 to 40 percent.
These figures demonstrate the importance, for any organisation, of selecting candidates who are reliable and safety conscious. For anyone operating in the retail, transport, heavy industry, production or hospitality sectors, by making dependability and safety assessment part of your recruitment and restructuring processes you can quickly identify the candidates who are most likely to have good attendance records, be effective and positive team members and be more safety conscious.
As well as being an important part of the recruitment process, assessing dependability and safety can be a useful way of ensuring existing employees are in the areas of your organisation that most suit their strengths. This can help you reduce recruitment costs by allowing you to identify highly dependable and safety aware internal candidates for more specialised roles.
The benefits of dependability and safety assessment
A recruitment policy that focuses on dependability and risk awareness can be essential for business success. Identifying these candidates, especially in the early recruitment stages, can benefit your organisation in several ways:
- Reducing the hiring costs by ensuring candidates have the right skills and attitude for the role
- Reducing the number of days likely to be lost due to absenteeism
- Reducing the likelihood and frequency of accidents at work
- Improving customer service in your organisation.
Contact us for help with recruiting dependable and safe employees
Improving workplace safety with SHL's Dependability and Safety Instrument (DSI)
The Dependability and Safety Instrument is designed to identify employees who will be safe, productive and reliable. It delivers a short assessment of a potential employee's safety in the workplace and is extremely cost effective as it is designed for Line Managers to administer, score and interpret without HR support. The assessment is quick and easy to deliver, generally taking only 7 minutes, and can be taken as a pen and paper test, an online test or even administered over the telephone.
The test itself contains 18 pairs of work-related statements. For each pair the candidate must select the statement that is most like them. The output score then indicates the likelihood of the candidate being safe, reliable and productive.
Find out more about the Dependability and Safety Instrument
Read how North British Distillery used the Dependability and Safety Instrument to improve recruitment
SHL helps Qantas identify safe and dependable candidates
Qantas asked SHL to help them develop an efficient and robust screening process for the recruitment of the apprentice aircraft maintenance engineers who are responsible for maintaining the airworthiness of their aircraft.
Qantas used SHL’s Dependability and Safety Instrument in a validation study to measure the performance and safety awareness of their apprentices, along with those of their managers. The study demonstrated that the Dependability and Safety Instrument serves as a reliable indicator of employee dependability and performance in an area where high quality standards are vital.
Russell Burgess, Senior Instructor at Qantas said:
“We are confident that by using the DSI as part of our recruitment process we will be able to have a more holistic approach to identifying those applicants, for the apprentice aircraft maintenance engineer role, who are most likely to be reliable and safety conscious in the workplace. Going forward, Qantas will implement this new tool as part of a larger initiative to help reduce workplace accidents and time lost on injuries.”
Read the full Qantas case study
