title: How Do High-Risk Small Business Frontline Workers Learn from Everyday Work to Increase Risk Awareness and Prevent Workplace Accidents?
Creators: name: Willis, Tony N
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Workplace Accidents
subject: Risk Awareness
subject: Small Business Frontline Workers

description: Small business possesses unique characteristics not found within larger organisations, such as being more centralised in decision-making and having multiple resource constraints, including limited finances and expert safety personnel, leaving such obligations to the owner-manager. Likened within the literature to an octopus with multiple roles, the owner-manager has to diversify to survive. Survival is a term commonly used in the literature when describing the continual issues faced by small business operators. In addition to the demands placed upon small businesses due to their size, small business also creates an interesting context for the purpose of understanding dynamic risk management. Not ideally suited to the principles of bureaucratic safety management, where safety management systems and procedures dictate workflow, small business is more simplistic in its approach and relies upon dynamic social interaction to manage risks. This dynamic risk management style provides an environment where the safety II view of safety management, as emergent experiences of the workers, can be suitably applied as the theoretical lens for this research project. Motivated to improve the understanding of how risks are managed within small business aligned to the principles of safety II, the research design focused on frontline workers to seek the most accurate findings based on experiential fact. A total of 11 interviews were conducted with a combination of owner-managers and employees across small businesses from the trades and services occupations. Trades and services were chosen due to the continually high annual injury and fatality statistics. The research project discovered that small business is primarily motivated to complete individual everyday tasks over safety. Small business navigates the safety landscape in terms of job completion, and any act that seeks to interrupt the anticipated load for the day is seen as a threat and managed appropriately. Safety activities are viewed either as an annoyance or a resource, dependent upon whether they hinder or support the timely completion of work. 3 The necessity to identify hazards and risks to prevent accidents is informed via an experiential learning cycle that can be experienced practically, shared personally by colleagues or, in some cases, imparted by other workers who are not known personally to the work crew. Safety messages are regularly utilised via different methods and include ‘during task completion messages’ that are based on that person’s previous experience with the task. This research adds to the limited body of knowledge in proactive accident prevention in the sense that we can start to understand that other hazard control techniques should be looked at differently to complement real-world learning. Real-world learning to better assist workers who are confronted by and manage risks that emanate from everyday work completion. In closing, recommendations are made to aid in expanding the body of knowledge in the area of empirical evidence to understand everyday work to strive to further reduce accidents putting control of such, in the hands of the workers.