Nearly a quarter of all Metro employees have seen a fellow worker texting or talking on a cell phone while operating a train or bus, and many employees said they would not report a safety violation for fear of retaliation from co-workers, according to a safety survey of more than 9,000 Metro employees.
At the first meeting of the transit agency’s newly established safety and security committee, members of Metro’s board of directors on Thursday heard the results of the first-of-its-kind survey completed in July by more than 90 percent of the agency’s work force.
Almost 60 percent of Metro’s roughly 10,000 employees reported seeing a safety violation, including train or bus drivers texting or talking on cellular phones — a “one strike” offense that agency policy stipulates should lead to termination.
Other violations employees reported observing included alcohol and drug use, or more ambiguous “unsafe work conditions.”
More than 30 percent of those observing a safety violation did not report the violation to a supervisor. And according to the survey, roughly 34 percent of workers who said they would not report a safety violation cited fear of “retaliation” from co-workers, not punishment from supervisors, as their reason.
“The retaliation [employees] worried about was surprising for us,” said Scott Bohannon, general manager of Corporate Executive Board, the Arlington company that conducted the survey.
Bohannon said in his experience the fear of retaliation from co-workers was uncommon when questioning employees within other organizations.
“Usually that fear was focused around being ostracized,” Bohannon said of the situation within Metro. “If your peers aren’t going to talk to you, if they’re not going to include you, that could be a big barrier.”
Bohannon said he could not provide more specific examples because the survey was designed only to determine what sorts of safety concerns employees would or would not report, and why, not to identify specifics of incidents that had occurred.
Interim General Manager Richard Sarles said the peer retaliation issue was for him the survey’s most startling finding.
“I had not focused on that before, but by gaining this information we can be aware of that as we develop our strategy to improve the situation,” he said.
Bohannon urged Metro to recognize that the agency’s problems varied from one department to the next.
“There is no one safety culture at Metro,” he said. “It will be important that the solutions Metro pursues are tailored to the individual [employee] group.”
