The importance of context in designing effective safety interventions

Link to report: Designing safety interventions for specific contexts

This report, commissioned by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and authored by Colin Pilbeam from Cranfield University and Nektarios Karanikas from Queensland University of Technology, provides recommendations for the efficient contextualisation of health and safety interventions across a range of industries.

Workplace health and safety (H&S) is a significant global issue. Around 500 million people each year are adversely affected by work-related injuries and illnesses, while the number of daily workplace fatalities runs into the thousands.

One explanation for these alarming statistics may lie in the way safety interventions are introduced and implemented in different contexts. Misalignment between interventions and context increases the possibility of failure with adverse consequences. Where interventions 'fit' the context, safety performance is high.

There is a clear requirement to minimise harm and maximise worker wellbeing in the workplace, a change that can be driven by the implementation of context-appropriate safety interventions. However, the degree to which organisations and occupational H&S researchers and trainers contemplate contextualisation processes, and the variables that influence these processes, when sourcing, designing and implementing safety interventions is unclear and may account for the lack of success observed for some interventions.

In this report we attempt to address this knowledge gap and present the findings of our investigation into whether and how researchers, trainers, and organisations consider contextual factors in safety interventions.

The report includes several recommendations to ensure the efficient contextualisation of health and safety interventions across a range of industries, including how to improve workplace H&S training – the most common intervention – and its implementation:

1. To ensure that safety interventions deliver the maximal return on investment, organisations should begin considering the context of interventions as much as the intervention itself during implementation.
2. Organisations, OSH training providers, OSH institutions and agencies, and academia should develop guidelines that indicate key success factors (KSFs) for safety training effectiveness within the organisational context, and how these KSFs can be achieved. These would consider organisational characteristics, trainee demographics and features of the intervention. These KSFs could then be used to measure the success of different interventions and training facilitating continual improvement.
3. Online safety training materials are a powerful tool to deliver safety training; however, they often lack proper contextualisation. Organisations, OSH training providers, OSH institutions and agencies, and academia should develop guidelines for designing online safety training materials that properly consider context. This should consider aesthetics, usability and usefulness drawing on existing knowledge of technology acceptance.
4. As above organisations, OSH training providers, OSH institutions and agencies, and academia should develop guidelines to produce immersive, interactive, digital content for contextually relevant safety training materials to meet growing demand.
5. Safety interventions and training should not be a box ticking exercise and should develop over time. OSH training providers, OSH institutions and agencies and OSH regulators should promote the need to review the benefits of safety training after the event and to review current understanding before re-training.

Link to report: Designing safety interventions for specific contexts