Background Organisations spend a considerable amount of time and effort on diagnosing and analysing risks within their organisation. In the area of occupational and process safety, a myriad of employee survey instruments is available. Many studies show that operational processes play an important role in an organisations overall safety. Yet, so far safety surveys mainly focus on safety measures or operational safety processes. A flexible instrument was developed with which a wide variety of constructs, from different disciplines, can be measured in a consistent and practical way. The resulting survey distinguishes itself from existing safety surveys by extending the scope with the operational processes which are also referred to as the ‘Core Business’. Study This study reports on the development of a catalogue of constructs which were derived from scientific literature and practice. Each of these constructs has been developed with a view towards measurability in an employee survey. The reliability and validity for fifteen of these constructs was assessed. Five separate projects have been conducted within a range of organisations operating as high risk industries. Results Construct validity and the dimensional structure of the instrument have been established through exploratory factor analysis and confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. Diverse aspects derived from motivational and ergonomic approaches to safety proved to be distinguishable in this analysis. Conclusion The described instrument allows the mapping and quantification of various aspects of the operational process that are, based on existing knowledge, related to the occurrence of incidents.@en

In The Netherlands, approximately 2.300 workers have a serious reportable accident at work every year, of which around 60 are fatal (Bellamy et al., 2014). Safety professionals employ many methods to improve safety for workers within their companies. Interventions might, for example, be aimed at improving companies’ overall ‘safety culture’, at the introduction of a safety management system (e.g. Robson et al., 2007), or at improving the compliance of workers to specific safety rules (e.g. Peuscher and Groeneweg 2012; Bryden et al., 2016). The effectiveness of many of those interventions remains however largely unclear (Dyreborg et al, 2015). The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has started a project with the ultimate goal of developing a database filled with ‘effective safety interventions’. The interventions can be submitted by their developers using a fixed protocol. To support this project, a survey was developed, which was sent to all members of the Dutch Society for Safety Science (NVVK). In the survey, a list of 48 predefined descriptions of common interventions was used. Respondents indicated whether they made use of these common interventions and the extent to which they considered these effective. The survey thus provided an extensive overview of the use and perceived effectiveness of 48 specific safety interventions. In the near future, these insights can support the development and testing of more effective safety interventions.@en