Safety not guaranteed: Investigating employees’ safety performance during a global pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic threatened employees’ health and safety more than any event in recent years. Although millions of employees transitioned to working from home to mitigate infectious disease exposure, many worksites re-opened amid the pandemic as high infection rates persisted longer than expected. Safety guidelines were issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and other national initiatives to improve the health and safety of employees returning to on-site work. The current work addresses predictors of infection control safety behaviors in a general working population that largely lacks infection control training and expertise. Drawing from Neal and Griffin’s model of safety behavior, we investigated organizational factors (i.e., perceived safety climate, safety-related organizational constraints, occupational risk of COVID-19 exposure) and individual factors (i.e., infection control safety attitudes, conscientiousness, and risk aversion) associated with employees’ infection control safety behaviors shortly after returning to on-site work during the pandemic. Survey results from 89 full-time employees across industries demonstrated that the organizational and individual factors accounted for 51.19 percent of the variance in employees’ infection control safety behaviors. Organizational factors accounted for 49.02 percent of the explained variance, and individual factors accounted for 50.98 percent of the explained variance. Conscientiousness, perceived safety climate, safety-related organizational constraints, and infection control safety attitudes explained significant variance in employees’ infection control safety behaviors, while the occupational risk of COVID-19 exposure and risk aversion did not. Organizations may benefit from considering employees’ conscientiousness and safety attitudes during employee selection as well as enhancing their organization’s safety climate and mitigating safety-related organizational constraints.