Measuring enterprise proactiveness in managing occupational safety

The aim of this paper is to communicate results, and lessons learned, from developing and applying a national questionnaire based survey for measuring the initiation of occupational safety activities in Danish enterprises and public institutions1. The survey is cross-sectional and it is part of the general working environment surveillance system in Denmark. The current survey has a response rate of app. 76% (N=6423) at enterprise level. An investigation of the validity of measurements obtained with three different indices has been carried out.
The survey shows that through a 5 year period there has been a statistically significant improvement in the use of work place assessments (WPA) among private enterprises and public institutions. A further result is that the smallest companies obtained the lowest score on the knowledge and proactivity indices, while they obtained the highest score on the safety attitude index.