Assessment of Work Environment and Worker’s Safety At Cement Factory: The Case Of Mug her Cement Factory, Ethiopia

Abstract

There are different factors that affect workers’ safety at their workplace, and among that the work environment is the critical factor that could affect the safety of workers. As workers play a vital role in contributing to the success or failure of an organization, it is important to make sure that the workplace environment is suitable for them to stay in and work comfortably. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the work environment and worker’s safety at Mugher cement factory of Ethiopia. In order to achieve the objective of this study, questionnaire was developed based on Likert scale. The questionnaire was distributed to 320 respondents who were selected by simple random sampling technique. Data were gathered from 273 respondents (237 workers and 36 management staffs) with response rate of 85.31%. The collected data were then analyzed using descriptive statistics with mean score by SPSS v29 (Statistical Package for Social Science) software. Moreover, correlation and regression analysis were carried out to assess the relation between the work environment factors and worker’s safety and to determine the extent at which these work environment factors affect the safety of workers respectively. The descriptive analysis revealed that the safety management system, working condition, and workplace design were the identified work environment factors that affect the safety of workers. It was also revealed that the management staffs responded opposite to workers’ responses on the same items probably for the sake of factory’s image. The correlation and regression analysis was carried out only on worker’s response not including management’s response. The correlation analysis revealed that positive relationship between dependent and independent variables. Safety management system was highly correlated with safety of workers while working condition, danger sign, welfare factors and workplace design were moderately correlated. The regression analysis results 67.6% of variability in worker’s safety was predicted by these five work environment factors. This result shows the selected factors (independent varibles) have significant effect on workers safety. Therefore, it could be concluded that the work environment of Mugher cement factory affects safety of workers. Based on the findings, the conceptual model was developed to improve the work environment of the company. Finally implementing the developed conceptual model was recommended.