When employees get injured on the job, it not only affects productivity, but also can be costly to the employer in forms of Worker’s Compensation claims. To combat this, my workplace has formed an agency-wide safety workgroup. The workgroup is an intervention used to help change employee behavior and attitudes.
Monthly, injuries and claims are reviewed by representatives from all areas of the agency. The group is attempting to solve the problem of work place injuries by using interventions. Reviewing the claims could be considered a type of needs assessment. We identify which injuries are occurring, where they are occurring, and perhaps why it is happening. For instance, our most common injury is strains and sprains due to lifting consumers in an out of wheelchairs. Since the agency was able to target that problem, we were able to intervene and have a Physical Therapist come in and do specialized trainings for the at-risk staff in specific programs. Getting staff this training, as well as refresher courses, gives them the knowledge and practice on how to safely perform their job responsibilities.
Social Psychology tells us that we need to include goals to design out intervention. (PSU 2015). The goals for this intervention would be to ultimately reduce employee injury. Objectives, however, are more short-term than goals, and will help us create our intervention (Schneider 2012). For example, objectives to reduce employee injury in my company would be to create an agency wide workgroup to monitor situations, and offer relevant trainings to employees. The formation of the group itself is an objective, as well as the relevant trainings to give employees the appropriate knowledge.
A very important part of the intervention process is actually evaluation. This is where I think a lot of our time is spent in the group. We review the claims by month, program area, job title, etc. and compare them with previous years and months. We are able to identify what was working in the agency, and was just was not helping. It enables us to allocate resources appropriately, and focus on any emerging problems. Through the evaluation process, we were able to show that creating a new vehicle policy and use of speed monitoring GSP reduced accidents in agency vehicles significantly. We are also able to see through this process, things that were not working so well. One of our worksites had a lot of slips, trips, and fall injuries reported over the winter time. The company had come to find out that the property management company was not clearing the parking lots well enough, and employees were falling on ice and snow. Since we were evaluating this data, we were able to see that yes, we were addressing the slip hazards of ice and snow, however our current solution was not helping keep our employees safe.
References
Schneider, F., Gruman, J., & Coutts, L. (2012). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems (2nd ed., p. 71). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications.
The Pennsylvania State University World Campus (2015) Applied Social Psychology. Intervention and Evaluation. Retried from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp15/psych424/001/content/04_lesson/01_page.html