Assessment of safety climate perception of maintenance workers during major overhauls, outages, shutdowns, or turnarounds (MoOSTs)

Maintenance activities are used to sustain the reliability of physical industrial assets. However, studies indicate that some of the most devastating industrial accidents are attributable to poor safety perceptions of maintenance workers, especially during major overhauls, outages, shutdowns or turnarounds (MoOSTs). Typical MoOSTs involve the harmonisation of regular maintenance endeavours on a large scale, which in turn heighten risks of accidents and costs. Furthermore, MoOSTs are performed over short durations thereby necessitating parallel high-risk activities by different organisations that have different perceptions of safety and possess different safety cultures. Understanding safety climate can immensely benefit MoOSTs organisations by improving the understanding of attitudes and perceptions that alleviate workplace incidents. This study aimed to establish safety climate that would boost safety culture and positively impact perceived safety performance during MoOSTs. Safety climate questionnaire survey was deployed to MoOSTs workers of leading cement plants in Nigeria. Through exploratory factor analysis, three underlying safety climate factors were identified, which helped to determine that factors such as “training and learning from incidents”, “commitment of senior management towards ensuring safety and its protocol development process”, and “effectiveness of incident reporting systems during MoOSTs” were significant predictors of workers’ perceptions of safety performance. The findings also pointed out that the inter-relationship between perceived safety performance, MoOSTs safety training and organisational commitment were positively correlated.