Lantukh D. Increasing the level of safety culture at the coal industry enterprises

The dissertation, as a completed scientific work, addresses a pressing scientific and practical problem: enhancing the level of safety culture at coal industry enterprises. This was achieved by identifying the relationship between safety culture maturity levels and compliance with occupational safety requirements, which enabled the improvement of the occupational safety and health management system. The enhancement is based on the integration of the PDCA cycle and the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM), facilitating timely detection of inconsistencies and threats within each management system function and organizational unit of coal industry enterprises. An essential characteristic of any industrial enterprise is the level of safety culture, which enables the identification of underlying causes for elevated rates of injuries and occupational diseases. These adverse outcomes are predominantly attributed to non-compliance with safety requirements by miners. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the relationship between safety culture levels and miners’ adherence to occupational safety regulations in order to determine effective instruments for enhancing the performance of occupational safety and health management systems. To identify an effective toolkit, it is proposed to apply the PDCA cycle to evaluate the effectiveness of decisions made within occupational risk management, complemented by the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) to analyse variability in the core functions of occupational health and safety management systems. This analysis is based on assessing the impact of resource availability, established prerequisites, control efficiency, and timing. The study demonstrates that the variability of key functions within occupational safety and health management systems is contingent upon the timely and high-quality implementation of preventive and protective measures by all employees of coal enterprises. These measures are determined based on risk assessments, with their effectiveness substantiated through the identification of significant non-compliance with occupational safety and health requirements within each organizational unit. The article develops a process for determining significant non-compliance with occupational safety and health requirements in the divisions of enterprises, which consists of nine steps: conducting an audit, determining benchmarks characterising the effectiveness of preventive and protective measures, building a matrix of target and current compliance, determining a grey matrix of current non-compliance, determining weighting factors for the groups of requirements under analysis, establishing levels of non-compliance, and identifying divisions with significant non-compliance. An algorithm has been developed to calculate the fulfilment of occupational safety and health requirements by miners, taking into account the impact on their consciousness and level of motivation of labour safety specialists, heads of departments (sections) and employees themselves to comply with these requirements. The relationship between the coefficients of compliance (non-compliance) with occupational safety and health requirements by miners and the corresponding level of safety culture according to the Bradley curve based on the Likert scale is determined, where the ‘Indifference’ stage is recorded when the coefficient of compliance with occupational safety requirements is less than 0.3, the ‘Reaction’ stage - the coefficient of compliance with occupational safety requirements from 0.3 to 0.4; at the ‘Dependence’ stage - the coefficient of fulfilment of occupational safety requirements from 0.4 to 0.7; at the ‘Independence’ stage - the coefficient of fulfilment of occupational safety requirements from 0.7 to 0.9; and at the ‘Interdependence’ stage - the coefficient of fulfilment of occupational safety requirements from 0.9 to 0.1. It is proposed to define the overall effectiveness of the occupational safety and health management system as the sum of the performance of each function. At the same time, the effectiveness of each function is defined as the product of scores assigned by experts on the basis of audits to determine the number of proposed measures to reduce the variability of the function, the quality and timeliness of the proposed measures and the number of interrelationships of these measures between functions. A scale is proposed to determine the effectiveness of the occupational health and safety management system from 0 to 100 points: from 0 to 20 - low effectiveness; from 20 to 50 points - average; and more than 50 - good effectiveness.