TSO wins Discovering Safety’s category at Safety and Health Excellence Awards 2023

TSO won the award at last week’s Safety and Health Excellence Awards for their contribution to improving worker safety culture using data available from the Safety Climate Tool (SCT). TSO, who manage the tool on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive, have made a number of developments to the tool in recent years, engaging with users to ensure the tool remains market leading and that benchmarking data collected can be used by customers to make evidence based decisions to drive down incident rates across industries.

The SCT provides an objective measure of safety culture. ‘Safety culture' is often referred to as ‘the way things are done around here’. It's a combination of the behaviours, attitudes and values held within an organisation that influences how something is done, rather than how it should be done. Poor safety culture has contributed to many major incidents and personal injuries and can be just as influential on safety outcomes as a safety management system. Due to its intangible nature, measuring safety culture has previously been difficult to achieve.

The SCT has been the market leading tool to measure organisational safety culture and its impact on business performance for many years now. The tool has enabled organisations to improve their safety culture by using the data it provides to inform behavioural change programmes.

There are now more organisations using the tool across a range of industries and sectors than ever before, which has led to the development of a number of reliable industry datasets for organisations to benchmark their performance against. The most current all-industry dataset is compiled from data collected from around 130,000 workers.

Snap Surveys are the technical provider for the tool. Their technology powers the system and enables users to delve into the data and filter by company demographics variables such as location and heirarchy.

TSO were recognised at the awards for using SCT data to drive improvements in health and safety performance, by making user data more effective. Benchmarking is essential for organisations to understand the effectiveness of their operations and make data-driven decisions for improvement.

The ability to benchmark results against the industry average has become vitally important at contextualising performance for users. The latest data take scores from 453 organisations, comprised of a dataset of over 300,000 responses. Organisations can easily enter their results and understand how they compare against their industry peers and against public and private sectors. It’s a useful KPI for many to demonstrate improved safety culture.

We’ve been thrilled at the response to the new award category, which also recognised other leaders in industry that are using data more effectively to reduce risk of harm to workers.

In addition to TSO’s award, D Morgan plc and Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust were highly commended and OCO Technology were commended. Other shortlisted organisations were celebrated for their work in this area, including Nomura, RES, the National Access and Scaffolding Confederation, Teagle Manufacturing Ltd, COLAS, Proseal UK Ltd, IMI PLC and Bouygues Construction UK.

For more information about the SCT and the work that TSO and SnapSurveys do, visit the HSE Books website and snapsurveys.com