The Choice of Options to Comply with Occupational and Industrial Safety Requirements by Employees of Mining Enterprises

The reduction of occupational injuries at Russian mining enterprises is significantly hampered by mass and constantly repeated violations of requirements of occupational and industrial safety by employees. The problem is being addressed at all levels of enterprise, company, and industry management and involves trade unions and state supervision authorities. The international and Russian best practices for the formation of a high-safety culture have been actively adopted. Coal-mining companies and ore mining and processing plants organize training for risk management, and development of skills of safe behavior in the production environment for their personnel on a constant basis, which provided some results; however, the problem has not been resolved completely. The suggested approach to deal with the issue aims at the identification of those behavioral options to comply with requirements of occupational and industrial safety during production activities that are preferred by employees. Based on questionnaires filled by personnel of coal mining enterprises, the outcome of each option selected by employees has been analyzed. As a processing database of the questionnaire results, a game theory has been proposed: an employee is considered a «player» interacting with «nature», i.e., the working environment, whereas the comprehensive assessment based on criteria of Laplace, Wald, Savage, and Hurwitz has been used as a toolset. A set of potential strategies (options) adopted by an employee in order to comply with requirements of occupational and industrial safety has been established; the distinctive features of options have been presented. As a result of a questionnaire survey among employees, the information data has been collected to determine the expected outcome of a chosen strategy. The obtained information has been mathematically processed; the dominant strategy has been identified, and the probabilities of use of the other strategies have been calculated. The study results can be used to develop justified managing solutions by the enterprise's top-management in order to reduce repeated and mass violations of safety requirements, which will facilitate sustainable improvement of the occupational safety at mining enterprises.