Introduction
The construction industry in Ontario has been facing challenges in ensuring the safety of its workers. Safety remains a significant issue, as it accounts for a high percentage of workplace fatalities. Safety climate is essential in ensuring safety performance and indirectly affecting psychological stress. In addition, individual resilience plays a crucial role in managing job-related stress. This blog post aims to highlight the importance of safety climate and individual resilience in the Canadian construction industry.
The Importance of Safety Climate in the Canadian Construction Industry
Safety climate refers to the shared perception of people toward safety in their work environment. Safety culture has been shown to improve safety performance. Safety climate is a leading indicator of safety performance, and it affects not only employees’ physical health but also their psychological health. Four factors are preferred to measure safety climate: management commitment to safety, return to work policies, post-injury administration, and safety training. Construction organizations must promote a positive safety climate to improve safety performance and reduce job-related stress.
The Significance of Individual Resilience in the Canadian Construction Industry
Individual resilience is the capacity of individuals to cope successfully in the face of significant change, adversity, or risk. It is one type of positive psychological capacity for performance improvement. IR may help individuals deal with stressors that are inherent in the work environment but cannot be changed, such as work pressure. IR was found to be directly related to job satisfaction, work happiness, and organizational commitment. It affects one’s ability to manage job-related stress, which can lead to better safety performance.
Research Findings
The research conducted on 837 surveys collected in Ontario between June 2015 and June 2016 found that safety climate not only affected construction workers’ safety performance but also indirectly affected their psychological stress. In addition, it was found that individual resilience had a direct negative impact on psychological stress but had no impact on physical safety outcomes. These findings highlight the roles of both organizational and individual factors in individual safety performance and psychological well-being.
Conclusion
In addition to injuries and unsafe events, job-related stress is very common in the construction industry, and a safe climate has the potential to decrease workers’ job stress. This suggests that a safe climate can affect not only employees’ physical health but also their psychological health.
Safety climate is confirmed to be associated with fewer physical safety outcomes and with fewer job-related stresses. On the other hand, Individual resilience affects one’s ability to manage job-related stress.
Given these findings, construction organizations need to monitor not only employees’ safety performance but also their psychological well-being. Promoting a positive safety climate and providing training programs focusing on improving employees’ psychological health and safety knowledge can improve the overall safety performance of an organization.
