Greetings all! I’m excited announce the agenda for this year’s Behavior-Based Safety Conference. The ProAct Safety’s 11th Annual Conference is scheduled for 17-18 April 2012. There are pre-conference events on 16 April and post-conference session on the 19th.
The Big Picture: BBS’ Role in Safety Culture Excellence
Every organization should have a strategy for safety improvement that includes creating an excellent safety culture.What part can a Behavior-Based Safety process play in the execution of this, and what are the potential benefits of using BBS in such a strategy?This session explores the big picture of safety strategy and the specific role of BBS.
Deadly Sins & Vital Signs: Killing & Reviving Processes
BBS processes have some extremely vital “do’s and don’ts” that can determine success or failure.Learn how to recognize the deadly sins and the vital signs that reflect these critical elements so you can reassess your process to make sure you are doing (and not doing) these critical things.
Observation & Feedback: Cop or Coach?
Still focused on the number of observations?It is time to help observers really make a difference, not just hit target numbers and go through the motions.Turning observers into effective safety coaches is the key.Moreover, it might set a great example for managers and supervisors who could use a change in style!
Process Indicators: Quality, Quantity or Transformative?
What are the metrics that tell you if you are working your BBS process effectively?Are you measuring the right things in your own BBS process?Learn what they are and how they are best measured for both quantity and quality.
On the Horizon: What Lies Ahead for Behavioral Safety
No one knows for sure what the future holds, but it is important to look forward and predict what BBS will look like in the future and what role it will continue to play in safety and culture improvement.Preparing for inevitable changes will make your future smoother and more successful!Listen to the experts who have successfully predicted most of the changes in BBS for the past 18 years.
Company Politics, Snipers & Lessons Learned
Almost every BBS process has been held hostage or misused for some kind of company political goal.There are even people in organizations who worked to make BBS fail.Most processes survived these attacks and kept on improving safety.Learn some stories from the past from other organizations that will help you not let this kind of history repeat itself in your organization.
How can your BBS process actually manage the level of support it receives from supervisors and managers?How can you change incentive and reward systems to align with BBS and avoid the pitfalls most programs experience?Listen to and participate in this lively discussion of the issues and opportunities.
Open Q&A with Terry L. Mathis and Shawn M. Galloway
This last session of the conference is an opportunity to address questions directly to the Principals of ProAct Safety in an open forum.This is an excellent chance to finalize your plans to utilize what you have learned at the conference, get answers to any remaining questions, and bounce your plans and ideas off the experts.
PRE-CONFERENCE SESSIONS – 16 April 2012
Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) 101 for Workers
This session is designed to be an introduction to the rationale and practice of BBS for newcomers and a thorough review for participants at the workforce level who have already implemented a BBS process.Being well grounded in the principles and practices is a basic need for success to both those who are implementing or renewing BBS processes.The course will cover every major facet of BBS including the following:
·The philosophy and science behind BBS
·What leads to union resistance
·Functions of a BBS Steering Team/Committee
·The role of an Observer in a BBS process
·Manager’sand Supervisor’s support roles
·The responsibilities and benefits of employees in a BBS environment
·How BBS impacts safety culture
·How to keep the process results oriented
·How to guarantee process sustainability
·How to refresh and renew an existing BBS process
Attendees will be thoroughly versed on the basics of BBS to either return to a project or attend the Annual BBS Conference with purpose and focus.
Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) 101 for Management
This session covers the same basic concepts as the “BBS 101 for Participants” course but from a management and supervisory perspective.The support roles in BBS are less active than the participants’ roles, yet more critical for success and sustainability.In addition to understanding what BBS is and how it works, managers and supervisors need to know the rationale for having a process and the strategies for ensuring that it is successful.The course will cover these facets and will include the following:
·The rationale and ROI (return on investment) of BBS
·Selection criteria for Steering Team/Committee members
·Time-away-from-work requirements of Steering Team members and Observers
·Key roles, responsibilities, and expectations (RREs) of those participating in the process
·Start-up cycles for BBS from implementation to maturity
·Support and resources needed by the process to ensure success
·How to involve unions for support
·How to communicate BBS to the workforce
·How to utilize BBS as a safety culture building tool
·How to posture BBS in relation to other safety efforts and programs
·How to pump new life into an existing BBS process
Attendees will be thoroughly versed on the basics of BBS to either return to a project or attend the Annual BBS Conference with purpose and focus.
POST-CONFERENCE SESSIONS – 19 April 2012
Advanced Cultural & Behavioral Tactics – Guaranteeing New Results
Use the latest Behavior-Based Safety Technologies for spearheading safety process improvement, borrowing proven techniques from Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and experiences from over 1,500 successful implementations.
Create a customized plan to assess and improve site and/or organizational safety culture. Common myths about safety culture will be dispelled and a good working definition will be developed to empower understanding and customization. Assessment methodologies will be discussed and compared and each participant will see how to best determine the cultural strengths and improvement opportunities.
Based on the assessment findings, plans will be formulated to find the most practical and effective strategies to build on cultural strengths and address weaknesses. Opportunities will be investigated to utilize other site improvement initiatives to aid in the cultural improvement plans. All plans will conclude with measurement strategies to ensure long-term change viability and early identification of problems.
Teaching Supervisors to be Safety Coaches (Train-the-Trainer)
Supervisors constantly communicate priorities and strategies to their workers, whether they intend to or not. With training, supervisors can take active control of the messages they send to promote safety as an organizational value. They can set levels of expectation that point everyone in the direction of safety excellence and exert a positive influence on the formation of safety culture.
Most supervisors don't have the latest training and tools for coaching workers to perform their jobs safely.Becoming an effective coach can leverage a supervisor's influence to make significant gains in accident reductions. Coaching skills also improve other areas of performance including quality and productivity as well as safety. The benefits to the organization impact almost every area of human performance.
The training contains the latest behavioral coaching techniques and directly applies them to improving safety. A model for counseling problem employees or addressing serious safety situations is also included. The design of the training utilizes advanced learning techniques and helps attendees to apply the models in the classroom to reality-based scenarios right out of the workplace.
Between the recent articles in safety publications and the capsizing of the Costa Concordia, there is a renewed dialogue among safety professionals and others about accident causation.In the first third of the last century Heinrich proposed, from his observations of accident reports, that 88% of all accidents were the result of unsafe acts, 10% from unsafe conditions, and 2% from undetermined causes.One author recently refuted this, mainly citing the tendency to blame employees for accidents when much of the “cause” was due to systems issues controlled by managers.
While there is validity in looking beyond human behavior, there is great danger in overlooking it and its critical role in accidents.We should always look at the “why”, but we can’t forget the “what.”It looks like we have opened the door to a whole new set of terminology around what has been traditionally labeled “immediate cause,” “underlying cause,” “root cause,” and “contributing factor.”If changing terminology or consolidating terminology helps prevent accidents, I am all for it.
From the discussions on line, there may be a need for better developing the talking points around accident causation.It is hard to synergize solutions when it takes 1200 comments in a LinkedIn group just to get everyone agreeing on terms.
The main point that must not get lost in this discussion is the fact that behaviors , regardless of what causes, prompts, or influences them are critical to risk control and, thus critical to accident prevention.We have assumed a lot over the years about what causes human behavior and how to change it.However we approach it in the future, we must not forget it.If a driver swerves into the other lane, the probability of an accident just dramatically increased.THAT is human behavior.
Now, how do we keep drivers in their own lanes? That is the next level.We err when we think that changing the influences on behavior will automatically and completely and immediately change behavior.If we don’t change behavior, we have missed the mark or are shooting at the wrong targets.It is not about blame, it is about prevention.
If we forget this basic premise as we strive to better understand its causes and influences, we are taking a step forward and falling hopelessly backwards.We need to understand the next level of causation or influence or systems issues or whatever we decide to call it so we can use it to shape behavior, not forget it.
Greetings all! For the video podcast this month, I'd like to share with you one of my models that explains my theory on how we can help people internalize a needed focus in safety. If we want people to be safe, this means risk-free. For this to happen, safety strategies need to be portable and facilitate internalization. I hope you will use these steps to help the people you are supporting in safety. You can either watch the video here at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com, or you can watch it below from YouTube.
Greetings all! For the video podcast this month, I'm sharing strategies on how to develop and the key considerations when deciding to carry out self-observations. This can be a great supplement to a Behavior-Based Safety process, or simply as an effective self-coaching tool. As always, customization is a critical first step to ensure sustainability; so take these ideas and make them fit your group. You can either watch the video here at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com, at www.ProActSafety.com/Insights, or directly on the magazine’s site at: http://cos-mag.com or you can watch it below from YouTube.
Greetings all! For the video podcast this month, I'm sharing a vital methodology used by many global organizations, to help improve the performance of critical employees at any level of the organization. As always, customization is a critical first step to ensure sustainability. You can either watch the video here at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com, at www.ProActSafety.com/Insights, or directly on the magazine’s site at: http://cos-mag.com or you can watch it below from YouTube.
Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Colmar, France. This week I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published in the May 2011 edition of Occupational Health & Safety Magazine. It was titled, “What determines Your Safety Focus?” The article can either be found by visiting the magazine’s website at www.OHSOnline.com or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com.
We have received requests for older podcasts that are no longer available for download on this website. We are looking into why these old podcasts are not able to be accessed. It appears the application expires some of these once they reach a certain age. Even podcasts can have an age complex!
Soon to address this, we will start making some of these older podcasts available through a small purchase that can cover our costs to provide them on a CD or memory stick and ship to your location.
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit the ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com
In 1990 there were certain beliefs and practices that were viewed as state of the art and acceptable. I’m sure in 2030 we will look back at 2011 and challenge much of what is said today on the topic of behavioral approaches. Here in lies the criticality of never accepting a one-size-fits-all methodology to injury prevention and remaining continuously searching for a better approach. No one has the silver bullet, yet we all together can contribute to making this a safer world by striving for a better way to accomplish our goals through dialogue such as this.
My research and experience with hundreds of global projects in every major industry leads me to believe that the vast majority of incidents (injury, process, equipment damage, etc.) have a conditional, behavioral, organizational, and cultural contributing factor. Now the question is, contributing factor to prevention, or causation? The latter leads people to feel a greater sense of blame than the former. Blame isn’t beneficial for anyone other than those placing it. Moreover, it doesn't facilitate ownership in prevention.
It is my belief that behaviors can indeed prevent and cause an event to occur, they can also be the reason an event was avoided. We must look beyond the behavior and remind ourselves people do things for a reason. If we only address the behavior, without addressing the reason, the sustainability of our intervention strategies will be limited at best. Certainly focusing on behaviors in a vacuum might produce faster results, but is it fast or lasting improvement we want? A little of both would be ideal indeed. I prefer sustainable value-add.
What are your thoughts?
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com
In 1990 there were certain beliefs and practices that were viewed as state of the art and acceptable. I’m sure in 2030 we will look back at 2011 and challenge much of what is said today on the topic of behavioral approaches. Here in lies the criticality of never accepting a one-size-fits-all methodology to injury prevention and remaining continuously searching for a better approach. No one has the silver bullet, yet we all together can contribute to making this a safer world by striving for a better way to accomplish our goals through dialogue such as this.
My research and experience with hundreds of global projects in every major industry leads me to believe that the vast majority of incidents (injury, process, equipment damage, etc.) have a conditional, behavioral, organizational, and cultural contributing factor. Now the question is, contributing factor to prevention, or causation? The latter leads people to feel a greater sense of blame than the former. Blame isn’t beneficial for anyone other than those placing it. Moreover, it doesn't facilitate ownership in prevention.
It is my belief that behaviors can indeed prevent and cause an event to occur, they can also be the reason an event was avoided. We must look beyond the behavior and remind ourselves people do things for a reason. If we only address the behavior, without addressing the reason, the sustainability of our intervention strategies will be limited at best. Certainly focusing on behaviors in a vacuum might produce faster results, but is it fast or lasting improvement we want? A little of both would be ideal indeed. I prefer sustainable value-add.
Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Jacksonville, Florida. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published in the March 2011 edition of EHS Today Magazine. It was titled “The Contributing Factors of Behavior-Based Safety Failures”. The published article can either be found at www.EHSToday.com or http://www.proactsafety.com/insights/articles-and-white-papers.
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit the ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com
Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article I wrote titled “3 Crucial Precautions to Prevent Slips, Trips and Falls”. It was published 12 October 2010 by Canadian Occupational Safety.The published article can either be found at http://www.cos-mag.com or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com.
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit the ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com
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