Current challenges in academic research laboratory safety are rooted in independent management of a diverse set of chemicals and procedures as well as a high turnover of graduate student and postdoctoral researchers (herein referred to as researchers). While all researchers receive relevant Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) compliance training, site-specific training and the development of a safety-oriented mindset are usually left to individual research groups. Uneven training outcomes not only increase the chances of laboratory accidents but also may negatively impact the career trajectory of newly independent scientists since knowledge of and leadership in chemical safety is a requirement of any PhD-level position.
Traditionally, the safety record of an academic institution has been tracked through the number of reported accidents, the number of and attendance at trainings provided, and availability of resources. However, the tracking of these metrics fails to give us a real sense of the culture of safety of an institution. For example, an increase in laboratory accidents may indicate riskier experimentation, but can also be attributed to increased reporting brought on by better communication. In fact, studies have shown that the accuracy and robustness (and therefore communication) of incident data itself can be used to indicate the health of an institution's culture of safety. [1] [2] Additionally, safety trainings for the whole researcher population are typically focused on regulatory compliance and general rules and information, with more specific training being handled by Principal Investigators (PIs) and senior group members on an ad hoc basis. Although resources are provided to educate researchers on safety awareness and practices, they are often not properly integrated in universities to effectively teach researchers the core practices of chemical safety. [3] [4] [5] [6] All of this can amount to researchers passively receiving safety compliance information in a piecemeal way. Yet, it is the expectation upon completion of a PhD that an individual be capable of providing leadership on safety issues to a research team, which requires the ability to communicate with different audiences. [7] [8] In recent years, researchers began leading safety groups called laboratory safety teams (LSTs), which have begun spreading as an increasingly popular grassroots movement. [9] LSTs have the potential to enhance communication among researchers at all levels, enrich the professional development of researchers, and improve the culture of safety across academic institutions.
The modern researcher-led LST was first defined by the efforts at the University of Minnesota (UMN). [10] In 2012, UMN already had a system in place that required each laboratory to have a designated Laboratory Safety Officer (LSO) who was a graduate or postdoctoral researcher. From this pool, leadership from the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS) and Chemistry departments recruited seven volunteers to begin assessing safety practices and attitudes in conjunction with mentors at Dow Chemical, thereby establishing what they called the Joint Safety Team (JST). It is important to emphasize in this structure that the LST was not looking to step into a responsible training function such as that of a faculty member, nor was it looking to take responsibility for EH&S compliance functions. The LST was meant to function in addition to and in collaboration with both of these pre-existing structures.
The stated purpose of the LST was to address "the need for an improved culture of safety in research-intensive science departments...which involved enabling leadership by graduate student and postdoctoral associate laboratory safety officers (LSOs)." [10] Since this time, LSTs have launched across the United States with differing structures and objectives depending on the institution's organization, needs, and resources. [9] As LSTs have spread, the term safety culture has remained intimately linked to them. However, many researchers and practitioners have struggled to define, and by extension measure, improvements in safety culture in academic research laboratories. In an exhaustive analysis of the literature on safety culture in industrial, applied, and occupational psychology, Megan E. Gonzalez defined safety culture for academic research laboratories as "the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, social and technical practices, policies, and perceptions of individuals in an organization that influence the opportunity for accidents to occur." [11] She goes on to say that a "healthy safety culture will be one that minimizes the opportunity for accidents and nearmisses and are characterized by open communication, a system designed to continually improve upon the culture of safety, and provides for the confidence in the efficacy of training and preventative measures." [11] It should be noted that all three of these parameters are related to reciprocal communication throughout the hierarchy of an institution. While LSTs are not designed to solve every challenge related to safety culture (nor should they be), they have the potential to make a valuable contribution by enhancing communication pathways to enable this reciprocal communication within and across the institution.
Critical to communication is a sense of empowerment to speak up about safety issues.
Studies in industrial settings have shown the criticality of involving and empowering workers at all levels in the development of programs and initiatives to improve safety outcomes. [5] [12] [13] [14] Defining safety as "the ability to perform work in a varying and unpredictable workplace environment", Conklin highlighted the importance of workers to learn from each other and for the management to learn from the workers. [15] One of the cornerstones of the recently emerged paradigm of human and organizational performance is the concept of learning teams. [15] [16] [17] In an academic research department, a well-designed LST can play this role, serving to empower researchers to step into their new roles of responsibility and learn how to effectively communicate about chemical and laboratory safety.
In this review, we aim to provide a framework to establish and strengthen LSTs based on the experiences of others over the last eight years, highlighting the diversity of approaches and helping to build a network of collaborative graduate and postdoctoral researcher groups. While there are large aggregated studies attempting to measure safety culture across multiple institutions at one time point [11] [18] [19], few teams have published case studies in which specific issues are identified and resolved over time [10] [20] [21]. We first share the content of interviews with the leadership of currently existing LSTs to uncover the unpublished details of this grassroots movement (Table 1 and Table S1). Methods used to identify and interview LSTs are outlined in the supporting information along with means to connect with this growing network. Then, we elucidate the role that LSTs can play both in strengthening academic research departments and in improving the career preparation of PhD-level scientists. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about suggested metrics to measure the evolving culture of safety of an individual department.
(JST) LI: Joint Safety Team -Yale Chemistry Department hope that the information presented here will be helpful for building LSTs in other departments and forging cross-departmental collaborations.
Interviews with current LST leadership and published case studies have yielded five common components that are useful to establishing an LST. These components are not temporal in nature, so they can be incorporated in different orders throughout the process. Additionally, not all of the components are essential to launching an LST. We list these components below with no particular hierarchical order. Members of a budding team should evaluate their specific needs and action plan in the context of their own institution.
So far, each LST had some sort of champion at the outset. The champion needs to be someone who will be with the institution for the long-term. This person also needs to show a level of commitment to the survival of the LST that will inspire that person to look for ways to make the LST longer lasting. Finally, this person needs to be in a position to know of ways to make the LST permanent, beyond the scope and view of graduate students and postdocs.
The champions that have emerged have been: EH&S staff members, department heads, department safety committees, faculty members, chemical companies with whom the university has a relationship, deans, office and facilities staff members, and vice presidents for research (Figure 1). What sources are more likely to produce a champion is heavily dependent upon the department and its relationships to EH&S and chemical companies in the region, as well as how heavily influenced academic leadership has been by the conversations around safety that have been taking place over the last decade. [5] As the current movement was initially launched as part of a relationship between a university and a chemical company, it is unsurprising to find that eight LSTs mentioned chemical companies as being a source of a champion. Some of these relationships involve a representative from the company having regular contact with the LST in an advisory capacity while others involve company representatives visiting the university to give talks, presentations, or participate in events. Other relationships involved hosting laboratory tours at chemical companies with an emphasis on the habits and teamwork necessary to maintain a safe workplace.
Several teams expressed the importance of having a voice from industry emphasizing to researchers that an understanding of all roles played in chemical safety was a component of hiring decisions and an expectation in the field.
The majority of teams have partnered with EH&S staff and identified them as a source of a champion. Some teams were originally launched with primary support coming from EH&S staff members. The relationship between student researchers involved in these teams and EH&S personnel speaks to the robustness of the culture of safety that exists in the department. On the other hand, a small number of LSTs avoid EH&S altogether. There are views expressed that EH&S personnel are primarily focused on legal compliance and function as "the police" within the university; other schools have teams that are actively trying to change this perception.
Alongside the growth of the LST movement has been a parallel movement to find ways to transition the roles of safety professionals from being merely the "compliance police" to more of a partnership role with departments in supporting better (and safer) research. Anecdotally, the success of these campaigns is highly variable in research universities throughout the US, leading to a multitude of approaches to safety. There is also very little in the published literature regarding the institutions' experiences with these new approaches although the need for understanding the impact of these changes is great. Elevating the role of EH&S as a critical component of good research has been cited both by Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil as a key component to the programs that they have launched with universities (discussed further below).
Even if faculty members are not identified as champions, their active, vocal, and consistent support of LST activities has been cited by almost every team as critical to the establishment, growth, and continuation of the teams. The role that a faculty or staff advisor plays in the teams is also highly variable, with some teams cultivating that relationship after coming together, and other teams being directly managed by faculty advisors. The close professional relationship between PIs and their group members necessitates an ability to discuss safety-related laboratory issues.
Of the sources of support that were cited less often, active involvement from deans or vice presidents for research seemed to lead to changes that were important to the long-term development of a more robust culture of safety in a department. This is likely due to their ability to influence core values for the institution, allocate resources, and incorporate the service of advising LSTs into faculty evaluations. How comfortable these administrators were with getting involved does appear to be related to their educational backgrounds. We observed that those with a chemical background were more likely to fully understand the importance of chemical safety and to feel they were well-qualified to lead on this issue. Additionally, support from facilities and services personnel was found to be critical at universities at which a department was split across multiple buildings. In these instances, they were able to play the following roles: sending out facility-wide communications, coordinating training for emergency response, and coordinating laboratory renovations and projects.
In his interview for this paper, Tim Alford of ExxonMobil stated, "Safety is not proprietary." [34] It was expressed by student researchers from several of the teams that within the safety space, instead of competing with each other, all of the teams were working to help each other. These sentiments speak volumes to the importance of the collaborative network that has developed among all of the participants in this movement (Figure 2). This network is maintained via social media, websites, email lists, ACS workshops and resources, company mentorship, and team members directly communicating with one another.
Through this work, it has been made clear that this movement has grown organically through the contact and mentoring between LSTs (Figure 2). Although modes of contact differ from group to group, there are particular mechanisms that have been used more often than others. For example, Twitter and Facebook have been the two most consistently used social media platforms by the teams (Table 1). LinkedIn and Instagram are less commonly used but this choice seems to depend on the audience and norms of the institution. All of these platforms allow for the teams to self-publicize and are a cost-effective way to communicate information about resources and events. The most successful pages have weekly or daily posts to maintain engagement with the community but if only basic communication of information is desired, then less activity can still be successful. The disadvantage of social media is the lack of space to add information pages and the lack of calendar interface. It is also challenging to give a holistic view of the accomplishments of the LST or distribute materials developed by LSTs on such a presentfocused platform. Thus, many groups have also developed or expressed interest in developing websites. This project often takes considerably more time and effort to launch. However, once a website has been established, it typically takes less effort to keep it current and fresh. An additional mode of communication is creating a group email which fosters continuity as members of the LST change over time. Overall, the team members strengths and interests, along with institution norms, are considered when deciding on the LST's electronic communications strategy. Although the development of LSTs is considered to be a grassroots and researcher-led movement, the importance of a supportive network should not be underestimated when considering how groups have grown across the country (Figure 2). Dow Chemical through the Dow Lab Safety Academy and ExxonMobil through the PALS program have taken lead roles in the growth of this movement by emphasizing that a deep understanding of and appreciation for safety will be imperative for obtaining a job and being successful with a career in industry (see Supporting Information for a description of relevant company-sponsored programs). ACS has played a role in the growth of this movement by providing workshops and emphasizing the importance of safety leadership in a chemistry student's professional development. [41] [42] Faculty, staff, and administrative leadership at universities have played a role in the growth of this movement by supporting student, faculty, and EH&S staff attendance at workshops, company-sponsored symposia, and visits to other schools that already have teams. By providing and supporting these spaces, this network both educates researchers on the importance of safety in their chosen field and empowers them to connect their LST in the network both by seeking support and giving it to others. In the near future, we anticipate that this network map will look radically different as more mature teams inspire and support the establishment of additional teams in more departments and universities and as dormant teams find ways to become active again. For those interested in connecting to this network, please consult Table 1 and the supporting information for details.
Resources necessary to starting a successful LST have included: physical resources (copy machines, areas to post information, conference rooms, lecture halls), technological resources (email listservs, websites), captive audiences (seminar series, classes), access to one another's lab spaces, and money. The level of access a team has to these resources has been directly linked to sources of champions described above.
One way to secure resources that was found to be successful by many groups is incorporating LST ideas into pre-existing programs. Many members of LSTs have strengthened their networking skills by identifying and pursuing projects in which an LST activity would be an add-on to an already occurring event or assist in the restructuring of an event. As an example of an add-on, some LSTs have successfully introduced "Safety Minutes" to the beginning of seminar lectures or classes required for first year graduate students. As an example of a restructure, many LSTs have become more involved in the safety training given by their institutions, with an emphasis on making training more interactive, relevant for the individual, and accessible. Finally, some LSTs have worked closely with EH&S or department safety committees to provide feedback from researchers on safety concerns in the department.
Currently existing lab and shared building spaces themselves have also been utilized for LST activities that include near-miss reporting projects, peer lab walkthroughs, and new or improved signage. While incident reporting is typically required by the department and/or EH&S, the concept of near-miss reporting is still relatively new and is often not clearly incorporated into current structures. This gap has created an opportunity for several LSTs to introduce the near-miss reporting concept to their departments and develop mechanisms through which stories can be shared and used to educate others. Peer lab walkthroughs prepare participating labs for actual EH&S inspections and also enable student researchers to practice spotting non-compliant practices. Finally, teams have developed creative ways to improve signage in departments to support more consistent implementation of safety practices. A few teams have introduced gloves on/gloves off stickers for equipment in labs, universal hazard and safety contact sheets for outside of all lab doors, and safety posters to remind researchers of safe practices to be displayed in commonly utilized spaces such as in elevators or bathroom stalls. All of these ideas used existing infrastructure and minimal additional expenses on printing to create new communication pathways and learning opportunities for everyone in the department.
The final much-discussed resource is money. Most groups have reported receiving some sort of monetary support either from the department or from EH&S. In some instances, an outside company has provided it. When getting started, many groups described being funded on a project-by-project or seed fund basis. Other institutions have allowed for individual students to compete for awards through internal contests that can then be used to support LST activities.
Most projects have been easily supported on tens or hundreds of dollars. Some teams have managed to secure a line-item in the yearly budget of their department and/or EH&S of anywhere from $1000 to $5000. This has allowed these teams to plan activities further ahead and on a larger scale. It also serves as a way of assuring team members that the department is willing to continue to support the activities, making planning activities more worthwhile and recruitment efforts easier. One institution offers a fellowship valued at the same level as a teaching assistantship during a student's final year of study to manage the team. To earn the fellowship, the student researcher has to have shown a prior commitment to the team in earlier years. While a source of money is not a requirement for the successful launch of an LST, it has proven to be an important way to maintain support for and stabilize a team as it matures.
LSTs have been established with structures that range from egalitarian and informal to those defined by hierarchies with constitutions and bylaws. While no particular structure stands out as preferred among the interviewed teams, what does stand out as important is that these structures remain open and collaborative. Since LSTs have functioned as a way to build relationships that have proven difficult to build by other means, it has been critical for various teams to also consider how to work most appropriately with pre-existing committees and departments.
Many teams described bringing researchers together initially in a very informal structure.
This capitalized on the energy of a new project and gave everyone an equal footing in idea generation. As ideas were molded into projects, some teams found that this informal structure worked very well. In some teams, members took charge of the projects that interested them, while other teams had members working collaboratively together on all projects. Others found that structure and setting expectations became necessary as workloads were found to be unevenly distributed. Finally, some ideas necessitated a certain level of organizational hierarchy in order to be executed, especially when it came to handling finances.
Common components of more formalized structures have included the establishment of an executive board with the standard leadership positions, as well as the formation of committees to focus on particular project areas. Some teams have focused particular attention on having members that represent all divisions within a department. Others have gone further and recruited representatives from each lab which are either brought together for regular meetings and event planning or employed as facilitators between the LST leadership and each laboratory. In institutions in which a laboratory safety officer (LSO) structure pre-dated the LST, such as that described of UMN in the Introduction, this proved to be a sensible way to utilize and improve upon a pre-existing organizational arrangement in the department. Many groups discuss the importance of having representatives from each lab involved in some way, such that there is a feedback structure in place: the LST will be aware of specific issues in the department and each group will have access to the resources that the LST offers.
How the LST interacts with pre-existing actors also varies widely. There are some cases in which a faculty or staff member takes a direct management role, although this is rare. Much more commonly found is a structure in which a faculty or staff member plays an advisory or supporting role, either suggesting possible projects and collaborations or giving feedback on LST member ideas. In some cases, LSTs have either worked collaboratively with department safety committees or a member of the LST has served as a representative on the department safety committee. Finally, several teams have at least one member of EH&S staff keeping current with LST activities and looking for ways to collaborate on projects of joint interest.
No matter what structure has been chosen, the importance of documentation of activities and reporting processes have had to be considered. There are some cases in which the LST has functioned so independently and maintained such an informal structure that there was essentially no documented history of activities and no one outside of the team who is knowledgeable about them. This has proven to be extremely problematic when attempting to attract champions, secure resources, and recruit students. At the other extreme, some teams have experienced that having an overly complex structure from the beginning can make recruitment and retention difficult.
That being said, those teams that have developed a formal reporting mechanism have maintained better documentation and have been more successful at informing leadership in various departments of LST activities. Some teams submit monthly or quarterly reports to the department safety committee, while others submit them directly to the head of the department and/or to a staff member at EH&S. This documentation allows student members and champions to share information easily with other departments, other universities, or at conferences. In some instances, this documentation has culminated in a case study publication discussing the work of the team. [10] [20] [21]
There was unanimous agreement among the teams that it was important for the first project to require few resources and be as visible as possible to all members of the department. A low-resource project means that the group is not financially dependent and can gain a victory without the project becoming too much of a time sink. Teams frequently cited that because they were recruiting researchers, it was important to remember that volunteers are already managing many demands on their time and are looking to their PIs for direction on what to prioritize. In order to maximize the impact a volunteer has with their time, projects selected that had the widest impact were cited to be the most motivational for the group, possibly because it was perceived to be worthy of the time spent. High profile projects include those that have a wide reach and pique the interest of people at all levels in the department.
The type of event that was successful depended on the department's present safety priorities. However, successful LST events cluster around four types: communication, problem solving, leadership development, and teamwork (Figure 3). Communication projects are often focused on written communication methods (newsletters, flyers, and posters) as many described these as the easiest to design and distribute, either in physical spaces in the building (bathroom stalls, elevators, display boards) or online (social media, websites, listservs). Near-miss reporting projects include another layer of complexity as the project is requesting that department members provide the content by sharing their near-miss stories, which often requires anonymity in reporting and trust-building with the LST. Safety Moments have taken the form of written communication distributed by electronic means, but have also been delivered in person to captive audiences (seminars, classes, group meetings). Roundtable Safety Q&As are a creative upgrade to this idea that invites an interested audience to take in a Safety Moment and add to it by sharing stories, experiences, and guidance with peers. A department-wide survey has been employed by multiple teams to determine initial goals and define projects (UMN's approach discussed in reference [10] and University of Chicago's approach discussed in reference [21]). Developing a survey that results in actionable and sensible information is more difficult than it may sound. While not a typical skill set acquired by those going through a chemical education, effective survey research methods are a much debated and challenging aspect of social science research. [43] [44] There are a small number of examples in which surveys have been developed and utilized in order to measure the safety culture of research laboratory environments and can function as a good starting place. [11] [18] Additionally, if the survey is developed with care, it could function as a measurement tool over time for success of LST efforts. This will be discussed further below.
Problem-solving activities have included problems that have been identified in the department that LSTs have taken the actions to solve. The Teamwork cluster (Figure 3) includes activities that LSTs have improved upon by serving as a conduit for student researcher feedback on safety issues and needs in the department. These are examples of where an LST has provided the continuous feedback loop necessary to building a stronger safety culture both with the department and EH&S. Including contact with industry has served as a means of learning safety culture strengthening tactics from industry to adapt them for the academic research environment.
Finally, the Leadership Development cluster (Figure 3) enables student researchers to share their work with others and connect to the network described above (Figure 2).
As groups start planning events, lab safety can quickly become a rather serious topic and
LSTs have reported feeling overwhelmed by the safety "horror stories" from their colleagues.
This has left many with a feeling of great responsibility that comes with trying to change a department's safety culture. Successful groups stressed the importance of quickly organizing and prioritizing project goals in order to take advantage of the initial rush of excitement rather than being paralyzed by the enormity of the issues at hand.
The top challenge described by the teams was trouble with recruitment (Figure 4). Many teams not only have experienced difficulty with recruiting numbers of individuals, but also with recruiting a representative diversity of individuals across years and disciplines. with other departments to enlarge the LST but have found departmental cultural differences to be larger than originally anticipated.
As teams have matured, some are observing a lack of effectiveness after the initial excitement of the founding and are now realizing that habit change in the laboratory is more challenging than initially anticipated. The voluntary nature of most activities initiated by LSTs, such as peer lab walkthroughs, equates to high variability in participation. Near-miss reporting systems in particular have taken time and effort to set up, yet several teams have said they do not live up to expectations as students do not submit incidents even though casual conversation reveals they are occurring. Many teams cite fear of retaliation as the main reason for lack of participation, so anonymizing forms and discussing accidents in a non-punitive way (focused on learning experiences) could be designed to overcome this issue. However, teams report that students believe that the details of the incident will reveal them anyway. The other reason for non-reporting heard often is a lack of interest or the view that nothing potentially dangerous ever happens in their labs. Both reasons are directly related to a gap in educating the student researchers on this concept that is difficult to fill.
A third set of challenges plagued several teams that included uneven work distribution and lack of visibility among the students. While many have experienced the first flush of excitement from brainstorming with a core group of enthusiastic volunteers, the reality has meant struggles with distributing work appropriately and getting the message out to all members of the department.
As a team struggles with recruitment, organization, and effectiveness, it is critical to have a means of passing information from one executive board to the next. Current teams are relying primarily on two strategies: (1) overlap in senior and junior leadership, and (2) an electronic database of some sort with documentation accessible to all members. The situation is particularly precarious given the constant turnover one must anticipate in graduate school. This is a critical point for a strong champion to be able to play a role by ensuring continuity. A small number of teams have a faculty or staff member who plays a larger organizational role that works to ensure continuity. Another approach taken by one school has been to fund a fellowship position for one student researcher in their fifth year to manage the otherwise volunteer team (referred to above).
This struggle also reveals the importance of thinking through the structure of the team and determining a documentation and reporting plan from the outset as described above.
The analysis of challenges expressed by existing LSTs highlights the importance of addressing the communication pathways and being cognizant of the structure and function of an academic institution. Successful LSTs articulate the value of their activities, discussed in more detail below, to obtain the buy-in from the entire institutional hierarchy. Being part of a network has helped these LSTs attract external resources for promoting their activities to their institutions. Some of the founding influences identified in Figure 2 consisted of supportive company representatives and department members of a university with a successful LST speaking at other universities about this success. A well-placed invitation to a speaker for a department's seminar series has gone a long way for some teams both to encourage more enthusiastic faculty support and create higher visibility among the students. The unifying characteristics of successful LSTs included the engagement of the learning audience in the LST activities comprising researchers, faculty, and university administration. This continuous engagement is particularly important considering high turnover of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
It is also imperative to recognize that the teams being discussed are the ones we found that were verifiably active through the networks described in the Introduction and detailed in the Supporting Information. Some of these teams have gone through significant dips in activity from which they have been able to rebound. Other teams, not detailed here, have yet to come back from those dips and can be described as in a state of dormancy. The strategies elucidated here are meant to assist new LSTs in establishing themselves, as well as assist teams currently going through dips, or teams currently in a state of dormancy. Multiple teams included here did describe support coming from individuals who were once students in similar teams themselves now in faculty and/or EH&S positions either at the same university or at different ones. By exposing researchers to stronger safety cultures, this movement carries with it the ability to have a ripple affect across all of academia.
A recent performance audit of the University of Utah's Laboratory Safety Practices from the Office of the Legislative Auditor General has served as a bellwether for many state institutions that could easily identify similar deficiencies in inspection procedures. [45] [46] As the University of California system has experienced, attracting heightened scrutiny from state regulators due to public pressure triggered by a high-profile event can be expensive and timeconsuming. [47] [48] Thus, from the university perspective, motivation for supporting a more robust culture of safety within research-intensive departments is clear.
As laid out in the introduction, LSTs can play an important role in enabling the reciprocal communication necessary to improve a department's culture of safety. However, given all of the demands of a graduate-level program and the "short-timer" status of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars within these universities, why would they expand their responsibilities and lead on initiatives that likely will not make a noticeable difference until they have long since moved
on? The answer lies within the critical element of professional development of researchers. On the one hand, an institution's educational mission aims at preparing early career researchers for their professional career with an implied expectation for leadership in safety involving hazard assessment and planning of experiments and processes. On the other hand, early career researchers contribute to the research mission of the institution by conducting innovative and groundbreaking research that requires a deliberate approach to safety considerations. Whether it is Geller describing "Total Safety Culture", Conklin elucidating "Human and Organizational
Performance", or Smith introducing the "Systems Approach to Accident Prevention", all emphasize the criticality of having the worker in the room as an empowered member of the team to share their everyday level of expertise acquired through hands-on experience with current In establishing their respective programs, both aimed to reach as high up into the hierarchy as possible within the universities. While they were looking to bring graduate student researchers into the projects as leaders, they recognized that participation from the top was going to be essential in recruitment and in sustaining the student-led projects. Just as management sets the tone for the rank-and-file of a company, PIs and university hierarchy set the tone for the students.
Another important part of the The Future is Metrics
The transformative work done by Dow Chemical and the UMN JST has cascaded into a movement that stretches across the country. While these researcher-led teams are doing great work, we have found that they are struggling to evaluate their own effectiveness. The two most common means of evaluation of event success have been reported as (1) if the event is held and
(2) the number of attendees. A summary of event types is discussed in Figure 3. Some events are specific trainings while others are intended to build communication opportunities. Non-event projects include raising awareness about safety issues and sharing reminders of best practices throughout the department. While specific numbers reached can be recorded, this does not capture the follow-on conversations among peers nor does it inform how these messages are being integrated into actual research practices.
As explained in the Introduction, the purposes of these teams are to enhance professional development of trainees and support a more robust culture of safety through improved communication regarding safety matters in academic departments. However, it is exceedingly difficult to determine how all of this communication is integrated into the safety attitudes and practices of the target audience -the ultimate manifestation of a department's culture of safety.
In the last 40 years, safety climate research has shown the measurements of perceptions of employees at discrete time points to be a robust leading indicator of organizational safety. [64] As this approach is designed to uncover the behaviors that "get rewarded and supported" from the perspective of the target audience, this is a fitting approach for an academic department to borrow from industry. [64] This research has also shown that in order for safety climate evaluations to be capable of providing actionable information, they must be intentionally specific to each work environment with its own set of hazards. [64] [65] An understanding of the "collegial, collectively governed, participatory, consensual, and democratic" nature of how academic departments are run helps to elucidate why LSTs have had the freedom to grow in the way that they have and can also help us understand the unique challenges to growing and sustaining them. [66] Quantifying the components of what constitutes a positive safety climate in their specific work environment will enable departments to create an informative safety climate tool that can guide efforts to support the growth of a culture of safety.
In the case of academic research laboratories, there has been admirable work done in the last decade towards developing tools to evaluate safety attitudes and practices. [18] [11] [67]
[68] Some LSTs have been contributing to this work through the use of department-wide surveys to determine initial projects to pursue. [20] Another aspect to documentation and reporting that LSTs need to consider is how best to support their champions, in particular when those champions are faculty members. Faculty members are typically evaluated by their departments based on three components: research, teaching, and service. While it is typically understood that service is weighted the least of the three in evaluations, it is still a component that needs to be strategically considered by any faculty member that may be approached as a champion. [69] Care needs to be taken to ensure that a champion supporting the efforts of an LST not become invisible work. [70] [71] [72] Documentation and reporting of activities done and the results of a regular evaluation survey can be utilized for others in the institution to make the argument to heads of departments, tenure committees, and administrative management that the service work being done by a faculty member through support of an LST is of great value and should be considered in evaluations.
In this review, we share for the first time details of the full scope of the LST movement in the United States. Using methods described in the supplemental information, 16 currently active teams were identified and interviewed. This work showcases the power of connection and collaboration in current grassroots efforts and emphasizes the growing need to develop quantifiable and trackable metrics. We hope this work provides interested graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, university faculty and administration, EH&S staff, and chemical companies useful information to start, sustain, and connect a program at their own institution.
In order to start an LST, five common components have been identified: 5. First project: high profile and low resource. All teams agreed that it was imperative that the first project(s) minimized resources and maximized visibility. Successful LST events were found to cluster around four types: communication, problem solving, leadership development, and teamwork.
In order to sustain an LST, four main recommendations have been identified:
1. Making a case for establishing an LST. Institutions with the most sustainable teams have clearly and strongly convinced critical members of the importance of having an LST. A recurring motivation was cited to be the improvement of student and worker safety by improved workplace safety culture.
2. Motivating student involvement. Pressures on graduate student time necessitate a strong reason to be involved in activities outside their core program requirements.
The demonstration of improved employability along with participation in safety teams has shown to be reinforced by the involvement of industry in these programs.