Over the past decade, the researcher-led Joint Safety Team (JST), has focused on improving safety culture across chemical laboratories at the University of Minnesota. The JST’s mission has enabled gauging safety sentiments, and spawned the practice of directly evaluating laboratory safety concerns and attitudes in the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science departments to inform and guide JST initiatives towards common, emerging, or unnoticed safety issues. Biannual lab safety walkthroughs executed by Lab Safety Officers (LSOs) provide opportunities for researchers to issue and receive constructive criticisms on general and hazard-specific safety items. Groups of LSOs are instructed to walkthrough each other’s lab spaces and complete a rubric designed to assign scores for general and hazard-specific safety items on a 1-5 scale (1 = needs attention, 5 = exemplary). In addition to quantitative results, the rubrics include short-answer questions to initiate safety-related discussions between LSOs, leading to actionable steps and more qualitative feedback. The aims of the walkthroughs are for researchers to realize safer, more efficient means for addressing safety items and to normalize safety refreshers and check-ins. The JST also utilizes this data to understand the state of safety issues in labs, identify arising safety items, and reshape future walkthroughs. Additionally, biannual safety surveys sent to researchers and staff/faculty reveal sentiments shared across both departments, providing a fuller picture of the evolution of safety since the JST’s creation in 2012. These responses allow us to couple lab safety walkthrough results, and other JST initiatives, with the researcher’s sense of safety. Compilation of a decade’s worth of walkthrough and survey results evidence the evolution of safety directly in research labs and broadly across the departments, respectively, and supply the JST with a continuous update on its success in its initiatives and overall mission while informing new initiatives.

Quantitative and qualitative indicators of safety culture evolution by the joint safety team

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