Employee well-being framework to facilitate a total safety culture within a nuclear power plant

Abstract

Employee well-being, i.e. a total state of physical, mental and social health, is a prerequisite for organizational performance. Given its importance, employee well-being is receiving increased attention in the literature from a variety of perspectives. Studies focusing on occupational disease show that occupational stress is on the increase. In this regard the United Nation’s International Labor Organization recently described occupational stress as a worldwide epidemic. Occupational stress cannot therefore exclude complex nuclear facilities. Probabilistic Safety Assessment techniques were subsequently used to develop scenarios for hypothetical accidents that might result in severe core damage and to estimate the frequency of such accidents. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission places emphasis on a Safety Conscious Work Environment as an attribute of a safety culture within a nuclear plant and the SECY-04-0111 regulator stipulates that the necessary full attention should be given to safety matters and that personal dedication and accountability of all should engage in activities which have bearing on the safety of nuclear power plants. Findings of occupational stress studies indicate that the workplace is the main source of occupational stress, which spills over to the environment, family and society. Well-being studies focusing on employee engagement show that few employees are engaged, while the vast majority is not engaged, or even disengaged. This finding suggests that employees’ well-being may be at risk, affecting the organization’s risk profile. Additionally, these studies reiterate the role of leadership and management in ensuring employee well-being. If organizations do not attend to employee well-being, it may have detrimental consequences for both the employees and the organization. Leadership is ultimately charged with the responsibility of creating an environment nurturing employee well-being, in shaping a total safety culture. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework of nurturing employee well-being, which aims to facilitate a total safety culture within a nuclear power plant. This framework integrates some of the most often-used tools to improve employee well-being. These include the (i) job-demands-control-support model of stress of Karasek and Theorell (1990) (Ref. 19), which proposes that work should be reconstructed to minimize, if not avoid bad stress; (ii) the job-diagnostic survey of Hackman and Oldham (1975) (Ref. 10) proposing the redesign of work as organizational change strategy directed at increasing employee motivation and productivity and thus improving organizational performance; and (iii) Kahn’s concept of psychological presence, which forms part of employee engagement, which allows employees to be fully present in performing their work roles. This theoretical framework will be empirically tested in subsequent research.