Supporting Statement

OMB Control #0693-0043

Expiration Date: 06/30/2025

NIST Generic Clearance for Usability Data Collections

The National Safety Council’s Survey Results and Analysis

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The Office of Safety, Health, and Environment (OSHE) has contracted with the National Safety Council (NSC) to survey NIST Associates and gauge their perceptions of safety at NIST. Results will be examined, and areas of opportunity will be addressed to improve NIST’s safety culture.

NIST Federal staff will be surveyed prior to Associates.

Objectives of NSC Safety Barometer Survey:

• Assess overall health of safety culture

• Provide proactive, valid leading-indicator metrics

• Benchmark survey results to NSC Database of more than 1,400 similar organizations

• Identify strengths and opportunities for continuous improvement of safety culture

• Compare responses by specific employee subgroups and demographics

• Validate management decisions

• Increase employee engagement, knowledge, and responsibility regarding safety

• Provide numeric baseline for future reassessment using more sensitive measures than injury rate

This survey is being deployed in response to two very serious workplace safety incidents, which created an urgent need for a safety culture survey and associated recommendations to improve NIST’s safety culture. The NIST Director asked OSHE to deploy the safety culture survey as soon as possible. The results of the survey will help guide NIST in preventing other serious safety incidents from occurring.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

NSC has a proprietary database of more than 1,500 establishments, representing millions of employees, that have conducted NSC employee safety perception surveys to assess and reassess their safety management systems. NSC researchers have compiled the survey results in a proprietary database, which will enable NIST to benchmark its employees’ responses against those of employees of similar organizations throughout the world.

NSC provided NIST with a default list of questions used in the safety perception survey. The NIST Chief Safety Officer has modified the wording of some of the questions to be in line with NIST terminology and roles. Several questions were added to allow for trending with previous in-house surveys.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

The NIST Director will email a link to the online survey to all 1,770 NIST Associates, encouraging them to participate. Please see the attached example of what the Director will send. The survey will be administered every two years using NSC’s survey web tool. An email invitation from the NIST Director, will be sent to 1,770 NIST Associates that will direct them to NSC’s website to participate in the survey. Responses will be collected by NSC’s survey web tool and stored in their database. To increase the number of participants, follow-up emails and reminders will be sent by Operating Unit Directors to their Associates. Additionally, posters will be printed and hung in public areas at NIST, e.g., outside of the library and hallways connecting buildings.

The potential burden for this survey is estimated at: 1,770 respondents * 20 (minutes) / 60 (minutes in an hour) = 590 burden hours if everyone takes the survey. The expected response rate is approximately 50%. The survey will be completely anonymous; The survey-taker’s Operating Unit, Division, and length of NIST service will be collected. NIST will have no access to individual responses.

The survey will be completely anonymous; NIST will have no access to individual responses. The survey-taker’s Operating Unit, Division, and length of NIST service will be collected.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

NSC will provide an online comprehensive results dashboard, which will include:

• Benchmarking service, comparing NIST’s results to the National Safety Council Database of responses, generating percentile scores for NIST employees compared to other survey establishments

• Discussion of survey background and methodology

• Description of survey administration and data analysis

• Executive Summary

• Dynamic tables and administration figures and data analysis presenting results by survey item statement and six categories with narrative explanations (in English)

• Dynamic tables and figures presenting a view of survey items by performance category Employee subgroup analysis and narrative text

• Discussion of findings and conclusions

Additionally, NSC Action Planning includes a total of six to eight hours of action planning facilitation by an NSC consultant to support and facilitate survey results interpretation, strategic component selection for action planning, and the introduction of the SMART countermeasure development approach.