Sopranos Company and HR Management - Case Study Example

Topic: Human resource Project Name: Institution: Date: Introduction In this report we will analyze Soprano’s company and the 5 keys the HR management is recommended to implement during the next year. The changes will improve the wellbeing of the company and serve for its prosperity. The relation between safety climate components and safety levels has been observed in other studies. Brown and Holmes14 explored safety climate measurement in two groups of employees having and having not being involved in accidents at work. They observed clear differences in levels of safety climate perception in both groups, although their observations were cross sectional; as pointed out by these authors, physical trauma may influence a posteriori employees’ perception of management concern about safety at work, the temporal relation being uncertain. Company policy towards safety was found to be the main determinant of safety climate in a study carried out on employees of three airport companies.5 In this study, the companies with higher safety levels, measured by the frequency of incidents/accidents during the previous 12 months, also had higher scores in the safety climate. However, the researchers discussed the difficulties of properly measuring “safety level” in the companies, a recurrent problem in occupational health and safety evaluation. It should be noted that data from these previous studies are also cross sectional. Besides validation of workers’ report of safety climate levels at their workplace, intervention studies improving safety climate at selected companies and measuring workers’ behaviour towards safety before and after the intervention will strongly help to further clarify the relations between safety climate, safety levels, and workers’ behaviour regarding safety at work. This study was focused on the pottery industry in Castellon, a sector with particular features. In fact the pottery industry is a modern industry compared to other industrial sectors in the area. In this context, mean safety climate index could be considered as particularly high (61% of the workers rated SCI ⩾70), a somewhat surprising finding for a country exhibiting the highest rates of occupational accidents in Europe.15 Even so, differences for level of occupational risk management and prevention among pottery plants (in Castellon there are near 300 different pottery plants) do exist, and we think that the results of this study should be equally valid for other industries or service companies, a hypothesis to be tested in future research. In 2016, the Sopranos are a major supplier of smallgoods to the Australian market. The product range spans across traditional Italian salami, ham, bacon and traditional smallgoods. The company has state-of-the-art facilities located in Bundoora, Victoria and employ over 250 workers. The company has a very flat organisational structure – the CEO reports to a Board of Directors (made up of members of the Soprano family) . Each department has a manager, with the production department having supervisors who directly manage the production line worker. Penalties for breaches of the Occupational Health & Safety Act 2004 were substantially increased. The maximum penalties are now $1,075,050* for a body corporate and $215,010 for a natural person* for individuals: 1. As an employer you must provide a safe and healthy workplace for your workers and contractors. This includes providing and maintaining safe plant (such as machinery and equipment) and safe systems of work (such as controlling entry to high risk areas, controlling work pace and frequency and providing systems to prevent falls from heights)implementing arrangements for the safe use, handling, storage and transport of chemicals (such as dangerous goods and other harmful materials)maintaining the workplace in a safe condition (such as ensuring fire exits are not blocked, emergency equipment is serviceable, and the worksite is generally tidy)providing workers and contractors with adequate facilities (such as clean toilets, cool and clean drinking water, and hygienic eating areas).You must ensure that other people (such as your customers, visitors and the general public) are not endangered by the conduct of your business (for example, by providing protection from falling debris around construction sites, controlling traffic access to your workplace and limiting public access within your workplace). f a claim has been accepted but you do not believe that you were the employer of the worker at the time of the injury, or that the worker was not a worker within the meaning of Victorian workers compensation legislation, then you have the right to request the decision to accept liability be reviewed.You have 60 days from the date you receive notice of the acceptance of liability for the claim to request WorkSafe undertake the review. If it is determined that liability for the claim should not have been accepted against your WorkCover insurance then any necessary premium adjustments will be made. 2. Despite the abundance of research in this area, There has been very little research on climate improvement, says Zohar. He notes that most research has focused on different ways to measure safety climate. There are perhaps 30 safety climate surveys, but he cautions that most have not been validated – or in other words, they haven’t been shown to measure what they intend to measure.The one exception is that people started to notice the relationship between leadership and climate, he says. This is an area he has been researching himself for the past seven years. Effective leaders can improve climate An effective leader has the ability to change safety behaviours. Leaders’ concern for the welfare of their workers, their relationships with workers, and the value they place on safety are all aspects that contribute to effective leadership.Improving safety leadership should, therefore, lead to improved climate. This idea showed that it had merit in a recent study.The study involved a safety leadership intervention in a large manufacturing company in Nova Scotia. Zohar began this research while he was a Visiting Scientist at the Institute from 2003 to 2005. David Stuewe, a professor in the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University and former CEO of Nova Scotia’s Workers’ Compensation Board, is another member with this study team.The intervention included a workshop with general managers, department heads, direct supervisors and union representatives at the company to introduce them to the concept of safety leadership. The workshop was followed by weekly, confidential coaching sessions over several months.These sessions were based on a unique approach in which informal daily conversations of managers were randomly chosen. The conversations were then analyzed to identify main messages, to see if there was discussion about safety, for instance. Given the longstanding premise that “Leaders create climate/culture at the workplace,” the main theme of coaching was: Which kind of climate are you currently promoting through your daily messages?The second phase involved coaching sessions with pairs of leaders who had direct reporting relationships with each other. Each pair had six to nine sessions. At these sessions, they defined expectations of each other, agreed on safety objectives and evaluated their progress based on their daily conversations. The underlying focus was on sending clear and effective safety messages during daily communication.All employees at the company were surveyed before the intervention, at the end of the intervention phase, and six months later to see if safety climate changed. Each survey yielded more than 450 responses, with more than seven in 10 employees participating.At each stage, there were improvements, with an overall 11 per cent improvement in safety climate. As verification, improvements were also recorded through random observations of safety procedures and of leadership safety interactions. The IWH’s Bigelow, along with Zohar, Stuewe and other researchers, will be developing a pilot project to introduce safety leadership development in unions and to managers in British Columbia. The project will be delivered through a series of workshops with the aim of targeting 3,000 people.Other types of OHS programs might provide another avenue to change climate.Bigelow and another research team are exploring this idea as part of a study in Ontario’s electrical and utilities sector. Although the study was not specifically designed to improve safety climate, the researchers are examining whether it improves after a participatory ergonomic (PE) intervention is introduced in six companies. More than 1,000 employees are involved in the surveys.The participatory approach to addressing ergonomic issues can improve both the physical as well as the psychological and social (psychosocial) factors associated with musculoskeletal disorders, explains Bigelow. We believe that firms that are implementing PE interventions will improve their safety climate.Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has seen improvements in safety climate in companies participating in its Safety Groups program. In this program, firms voluntarily join a group along with other companies to improve their OHS programs, with scheduled meetings and expectations. The firms commit to initiating or improving performance in five safety areas per year, and may withdraw at any time without penalty.Workers’ perceptions and experience in relation to occupational health and safety are scarcely considered in programmes for the prevention of work related injuries and diseases. Healthy environments and healthy behaviours are key determinants in occupational health. Workplace environment includes physical as well as organisational factors, and attention and interventions should be focused on both. In fact, in post-industrial societies physical environments are now less strenuous and dangerous than before, while organisational threats are becoming more relevant in many workplaces. Organisational factors largely concern the design, management, and organisation of work.1 3. Interventions over workers’ behaviour intended to risk prevention are usually based on specific training programmes. These programmes are generally devoted to increasing workers’ knowledge of job hazards and promoting safer work behaviours.2 However, workers’ behaviours regarding risk prevention are influenced by other factors besides proper training, and these factors should be evaluated and their relative effects on the workers’ behaviour measured in order to develop integral programmes for workplace hazards control. Organisational factors related to safety and health at work, including management’s policies and practices regarding occupational risk prevention, have been shown to affect implementation of workers’ safety training.There is an interesting hypothesis linking organisational and behavioural determinants of occupational health based on the concept of safety climate (the employees’ perception of the organisational culture and practices regarding safety at their companies, or their companies’ safety culture). In 1980 Zohar4 introduced this concept in industrial organisations, defined as the summary of molar perceptions that employees share about their work environments. 4. According to these perceptions, the workers develop coherent sets of expectations regarding behaviour-outcome contingencies and behave accordingly. Zohar identified two main influential climate dimensions in determining safety climate levels: relevance of safety to job behaviour (including workers’ perceived importance of safety training and workers’ perceived effects of required work pace on safety); and workers’ perceived attitude of the management towards safety. Some studies have evaluated safety climate in relation to safety levels in the workplace,4,5 judgement of risk among employees,6 and accident rates.7,8 A number of studies have also focused on the relation between healthcare workers’ perceptions of their organisation’s prevention programmes and compliance with universal precautions.9,10In Spain there has been some recent increased effort to improve occupational health and safety, in particular since Law 31/1995, on the Prevention of Occupational Risks, was approved.11 However, occupational safety in Spain does not appear to have improved very much in recent years.12 The determinants of safe behaviour among Spanish workers have been scarcely investigated in Spain. The present study was carried out in a large sample of Spanish industrial workers in the pottery industry with the aims of describing workers’ behaviour towards occupational risk prevention and exploring the relation between safety climate perceptions and workers’ behaviour regarding safety and health at work. The hypothesis that more favourable safety climate perceptions are related to safer behaviour among the workers was evaluatedThe remainder of health costs (called out of pocket costs or the copayment) are paid by the patient, unless the provider of the service chooses to use bulk billing, charging only the scheduled fee, leaving the patient with no out of pocket costs. Where a particular service is not covered, such as dentistry, optometry, and ambulance transport,[10] patients must pay the full amount, unless they hold a Health Care card, which may entitle them to subsidised access. A questionnaire was designed, asking for information on safety climate and workers’ behaviour towards occupational risk prevention. The questionnaire was mostly based on similar tools from previous research on the safety climate.3–7 A final version of the questionnaire was obtained after discussion and revision by the research team and other close colleagues; as it seemed to be easily understood by the workers in the first interviews and no problems were detected according to the interviewers, we decided not to introduce any additional change to it. Items in the questionnaire were grouped in three main categories: safety climate (1 general item and 10 specific items), workers’ behaviour related to health and safety (items 12–28), and workers’ health and safety training (items 29–30). All the items had closed questions, with different options for answers depending on the nature of the question: yes/no, 4-point, and 0–10 scales for the interviewee’s level of accord, selection from a fixed list of causes for specified behaviours, and frequency for some behaviours (5-point scales). Conclusion In conclusion, this study showed a strong association between workers’ perception of organisational factors related to occupational health and workers’ behaviour towards safety at work. Although longitudinal studies can further clarify the relation between safety climate and workers’ behaviour, management’s commitment to safety seems a strong determinant of success of interventions focused to improve workers’ behaviour regarding occupational health and safety. Smallgoods Company, Founded in 1920, the Soprano family of farmers and butchers had a dream to provide the Australian public with the finest quality meat, cured using traditional Italian recipes. sum it up In the questionnaire data were also collected on workplace size (number of employees), job category (unskilled workers, skilled workers, supervisors), type of employment (fixed, temporary contracts), time working in the pottery industry, and personal variables (age, gender, education (number of years), children in their charge (yes/no), and nationality). Most of the workers (98%) were of Spanish origin, so nationality was not further included in the analysis. Safety climate was first evaluated through level of accord (scale 0–10) with the first item in the questionnaire: “In my company workers’ health and safety are sufficiently protected”. Global mean for safety climate was high (mean 6.8, SD 2.2). Only 10% of interviewees rated their companies under 5, while 43% gave ratings over 7. Mean levels of accord (scale 0–10) with specific items composing the safety climate dimension (items 2–11) ranged from 6.2 (SD 2.8) for item 2 (“Productivity and safety at work are equally important”), to 7.7 (SD 2.5) for item 11 (“I have received adequate equipment for personal protection”). Higher levels of accord were also related to the presence of explicit rules for safety (item 9, mean 7.5, SD 2.5), while item 7 (“There are persons exclusively devoted to health and safety”) was found among the items with a lesser degree of accord (mean 6.5, SD 3.3). The distribution of valid responses to items 2–11 ranged from 83% to 100% for the total of interviewed workers. Bibliography Griffiths A. Organizational interventions. Scand J Work Environ Health1999;25:589–96. Cohen A, Colligan MJ. Assessing occupational safety and health training. A literature review. Report no. 98-145. 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