Employee Safety at the Workplace: An Empirical Study on Downstream Petroleum Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study based on safety practices that ensure employee safety at the workplace in the Sri Lankan Downstream Petroleum Industry. Safety measures and employee’s occupational safety are significant functions in an industry like Petroleum which associate hazardous chemicals and risky operations. Main objectives of this study are to compare safety measures of factory ordinance and real safety measures that are practiced by the employees in the work environment of this industry and to explore the employee safety performance during last five years by using the Recordable Incident Rate (IR) proposed by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Final objective is to find out the most important factors affecting the employee safety performance by considering employee related factors and management related factors. The study was done by using conveniently selected 257 employee sample as a representation of 1300 employee population. Questionnaires, interviews and direct observations were used to collect data. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected. Descriptive statistics (Mean, Standard deviation, correlation analysis) and inferential statistics (Regression analysis) were used to analyze data.
According to the study most of the rules and regulations in the factory ordinance are implied effectively except using some Personal Protective Equipment’s (PPE). All the IR values are less than 2.9, which the average IR value given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for Gasoline stations with convenience stores (+1000 employees). IR values fall within “Significantly Good” category. This study also extends the existing knowledge related to the relationship between employee attitude, employee safety awareness, training and rewards with the number of accidents occurred by each employee. The results of the study highlight that there is a strong negative correlation between proper training programs and number of accidents. And employee’s awareness about the safety precautions and positive attitudes towards safety also has a moderate correlation with the number of accidents.