INDUSTRY NEWS
“Even within this small area, the soil conditions vary,” said
Osama. “On average, the first 10 metres are sand. After that
we begin to find about four or five metres of soft rock. Beneath
that, the rock becomes harder. What we do have to contend
with is the water table, which is at 4.5 metres below our drilling
surface. Even so, we are completing the drilling at the rate
of about one hour for a 24-metre deep, 70-cm diameter pile.
So we shall finish our contract in a comfortable timescale.”
The LB 20 works at a maximum torque of 230 kNm, which
allows for a fast drilling cycle, and with a kelly drilling configuration
it can reach a depth of 52 m.
Mohamed Al Amin was the first of Delta’s operators to be
trained to use the LB 20.
“The LB 20 is an easy machine to operate, and once you
have worked with it, then you do not really want to work with
any other kind of rig,” he said.
New research is first to link CEO behaviours
to workplace safety culture and injuries
The Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB)
recently announced publication of research it funded in the
Journal of Applied Psychology, entitled “Safety in the C-Suite:
How CEOs Influence Organizational Safety Climate and
Employee Injuries.” The study’s authors are Dr. Sean Tucker
(University of Regina), Dr. Babatunde Ogunfowora (University
of Calgary) and Dayle Ehr (University of Regina).
Based on data collected from 2,714 employees, 1,398
supervisors and 229 in top management teams in 54 small-,
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The essential ingredient to
reduce workplace injuries is
a strong safety climate that
permeates the organization.
medium- and large-sized private and public sector organizations,
the research findings support a model that shows how
CEOs can play a more effective role in developing an organizational
safety climate in their organizations that actually
reduces injuries.
The stakes are high. Direct and indirect costs for workplace
injuries and fatalities costs the Canadian economy
approximately $19 billion annually. In addition to the human
toll, the economic loss can be staggering to a company, and
those losses impact workers and bottom lines globally.
The research tests the commonly held “leader-centric”
viewpoint, where the leader at the top is assumed to directly
influence frontline employee injuries. Tucker and colleagues
found that CEOs in their study actually indirectly influenced
workers’ experience of injuries by promoting an overarching
safety climate in their organization, achieved through the
collective learning experiences and efforts of the CEOs’ top
management team, managers and supervisors.
“Our research is the first to gather hard data to test if and
how CEOs influence injuries among frontline workers,” said
Tucker. “We found that CEOs have the most direct safetyrelated
influence on their top managers. These top managers
then role model pro-safety values and behaviours to lowerlevel
managers and supervisors, and this in turn cascades
down to the frontlines. We call this process collective social
learning, and our data shows that this process works to
create an overall safety climate that reduces injuries on the
frontlines.”
The essential ingredient to reduce workplace injuries is a
strong safety climate that permeates the organization. The
research demonstrates that this is achieved when CEOs,
senior managers, managers, supervisors and frontline staff
are aligned in their commitment to safety. Beginning with the
CEO, and with the active participation of groups spanning
the hierarchy, organizations can reduce workplace injuries.
“Aside from the human toll, workplace injuries and deaths
take a tremendous toll on a business’ bottom line, and this
research makes an important contribution to our understanding
of how we can improve worker safety and reduce
businesses’ costs,” said Phil Germain, vice president of prevention
and employer services at the WCB that sponsored
the study. “The researchers collected and analyzed a large
amount of hard data to show that reducing worker injuries,
which can save businesses literally millions of dollars, comes
through a CEO-driven, top-down cascade of directives that
promote a pervasive climate of safety at all levels of the organization.”
LIEBHERR
76 Q1 2017 www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
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