Safety Culture Excellence®

Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Pineville, Louisiana. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article I wrote titled “Behavior-Based Safety: The Piece Forgotten” published October 2010 in BIC Magazine. The article can either be found at www.BICALLIANCE.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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc

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Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Atlanta, Georgia. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article I wrote called “Behavior-Based Safety: The Piece Forgotten” published October 2010 in BIC Magazine. The published article can either be found at www.bicalliance.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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings, this podcast recorded while working in Devens, Massachusetts. For the podcast this week, I’d like to share an article I wrote titled “Extreme Precautions: What Are Yours”. It was published August 2010 in my column for 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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings, this podcast recorded while in Decatur, Alabama. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article Terry Mathis and I wrote called “Old Dogs and New Tricks: Keep BBS From Rolling Over and Playing Dead” that was published in the June 2010 edition of EHS Today. The published article can either be found at http://ehstoday.com/safety/news/old-dogs-new-tricks-bbs-7785/index.html 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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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ProAct Safety Founder and CEO, Terry L. Mathis was recently interviewed by the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA). They have a podcast called Safe & Sound, hosted by Melissa Hurley and Craig Sorrell. They were kind enough to allow us to repost the interview in its entirety for the subscribers of Safety Culture Excellence. To visit AIHA’s podcast site and listen to other interviews, visit http://www.aiha.org/news-pubs/Pages/SafeandSound.aspx

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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings, recorded this on the road in Louisville, Kentucky. The topic this week is about an upcoming webinar scheduled for this Friday, 05 March 2010 titled, Assessing Your Behavioral Safety Process: Finding New Results. - http://www.proactsafety.com/webseminars 

Many traditional Behavior-Based Safety process results plateau after the first two to three years of operation. At this point, the process can become routine and lose the original results-based orientation. When this occurs, the successes that motivated the process early on quickly diminish, and the entire process tends to simply “go through the motions” and slowly lose momentum. Don’t let this happen to you. 

Based on ProAct Safety’s extensive experience in assessing and improving all major approaches to Behavior-Based Safety, this webinar will provide a simple structure to internally assess your existing Behavioral Safety process.

I hope you are able to join us!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings, recording this on the road in Cheswick, Pennsylvania. We receive a lot of calls from organizations looking to purchase software for their behavioral safety processes. So for the podcast this week, I would like to provide some independent thoughts on this. There really are several software options available to an organization looking to implement a Behavior-Based Safety process. 

They range from spreadsheet tools to installed or online databases. Our firm (ProAct Safety) is familiar with all major methodologies and applications currently in use throughout the world. Due to this unique position, our firm has often played a support role in identifying, selecting and utilizing the most effective application that fits each organization’s needs. Many companies choose to internally create an application. This can be a good strategy. We have helped several organizations by providing the critical functional guidance necessary, to ensure a successful outcome.

A key success factor in any implemented Behavior-Based Safety Process is data management.  The data is what enables continuous improvement and helps the observers keep score.  Sometimes the reason workers are not improving in safety is because something is getting in the way.  Identification of safety obstacles and barriers, and measuring their impact is a powerful tool in improving safety.  Traditional safety tends to only focus on lagging indicators and failure rates.  The percent safe provided by a behavioral safety approach, is a great leading metric for comparison to the downstream metrics of accident rates, severity rates, costs of accidents etc.

It is critical for a steering team to design an effective data management and problem-solving technique, in conjunction with their behavior-based safety efforts.  This data flows to the steering team and helps them to remove barriers to safety and change the influences that could tempt workers to take risks.  Additionally, the ability to isolate problem areas increases the ability to focus corrective effort reducing wasted resources.  The observations are most definitely a great tool for beginning the creation of a culture of safety awareness and development of a personal safety focus; however without a good Behavior-Based Safety data management strategy, the process may not be sustainable.  

The data usually reveals first the weaknesses of the data, i.e. too little, not representative, not complete, what’s and no why’s on comments, etc.  Once the data gathering process is adjusted, the data starts to reveal where the greatest risks are and why workers are taking them.  The observation data combined with the original Pareto Analysis data helps to prioritize the risk issues for the team to address.  

The steering team will need to be able to identify trends in the performance.  It is important to know if risk taking is increasing, decreasing, or remaining relatively constant.  Since the observers in a Behavior-Based Safety process cannot see every precaution taken or not taken at the site, it is important that the behaviors sampled are representative of what is happening across all times and locations at the site.  If data is bunched into certain times or locations, the data may not be reliable.

Behavior-Based Safety Process considerations when determining software needs:

• First define the (paper) trail of how the completed checklists get to the data entry person
• Determine who the data entry person(s) will be
• Does the application need to be within the corporate infrastructure, an installable application, or online?
• How will the steering team/committee retrieve the data from the computer for their meetings (printed copies of reports vs. access to computer and projector to see the data in real time)
• What data will be posted and shared, and how will this be accomplished
• Will the team require support in understanding data and trends and the ability to create action plans to address them?

 We recommend the following types of reports for Behavior-Based Safety Data Analysis:

Report:  Overview

What to look for:  Low % safe, high # of concerns, adequate sample size

Use: Select areas that need improvement or attention

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

Report: Overview chart

What to look for: Safe vs. Lucky

Use:  Feedback to workers

Typical Distribution: Post and share with everyone

Report:   Trends

What to look for: Is percent safe increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?

Use: Track the effectiveness of the process and specific action plans

Typical Distribution: Steering Team, Workers in areas of action plan focus

Report: Observer Progress

What to look for: Has observer completed assignment and what is the quality of the data

Use: Manage the observation process and give feedback and recognition to observers

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

Report: Comments

What to look for: What is influencing a person to take a risk:  perception, habit, or barriers

Use: Develop steps of action plans to improve safety

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

Report: Additional Comments or Best Practices

What to look for: Suggestions or concerns about the process from observers or workers

Use: Continuous improvement of the process and safety

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

Report: Breakdown Reports

What to look for: Are the areas of concern concentrated by location, time, day, or other variables

Use: Target areas of concentration for action plans

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

Report: Action Items

What to look for: Any activities that are a result from this initiative that are: Actionable and within the team’s control (if not, who will manage follow-up?) and focused on measureable results

Use: Manage activities, follow-up, focus efforts and continuous improvement to ensure a results orientation

Typical Distribution: Steering Team

I hope I have provided a couple of ideas that are useful for you. I’d like to close with this, if you only have time to do one thing in safety today, what would it be and how will it contribute to making this a safer world for us all? Thanks for tuning in...

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Bonjour! Recording on the road this week in Paris, France. We have recorded many topics on Behavior-Based Safety and specifically the observation portion of the initiative. After all it is the engine of the average process. However, consider that conducting observations is not the only source of energy and there is not one type of observation strategy. There are several methodologies and practices. What works for one organization won’t necessarily work for another. Moreover what works for one site will not often continue to work later on. If you are still observing in the exact same manner that you did when the process started, than I have to question, is the process is still having the desired impact? An approach like this should have a positive impact on your culture and thus your culture should be enhanced, and so should the strategies.

This then means that we need to continue to enhance our tools to facilitate future gains. Peter Drucker said in his book The Essential Drucker, “Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems. Only the fairy tale ends, ‘They lived happily ever after.’” So let’s consider there are 5 major observation strategies for Behavior Based Safety and Terry and I sat down recently and discussed these. I hope this gets you to consider other options to accomplish success with your Behavior-Based Safety process. Here’s how the conversation went…

Have a great week,

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Guten Tag! Recording on the road this week in Basel, Switzerland. We have assessed and worked with all major methodologies of Behavior-Based Safety (Behaviour-Based Safety, BBS, Behavioral Safety, etc). Regardless of the effectiveness of the methodology, it is easy for processes to lose the drive for results, and fall into the process orientation. What I’m referring to is cranking the process, requiring more and more observations without measuring the impact on results. There is a principle in performance management that says “be careful what you measure, because people will work towards the measurements”.

If the only thing you measure in a Behavior-Based Safety process is the number of observations, then it is likely that you will get your numberes, but will they be quality observations; and will those numbers improve safety, or just crank a process? So years ago this brought us to start asking the question “What Triggers an Observation in Behavior-Based Safety?” We often find that the answer to this question provides insight to whether the initiative is focused on a results or a process orientation. I hope this topic gets you thinking about what you are measuring in Behavior-Based Safety. Moreover I hope it gives you some ideas to remind people this is just a tool in our safety toolbox. It is not the magic cure for all safety ails. This tool should be used to focus on understanding what influences behavior and overall culture. Certainly performing the observations will help, but remember the observations are not the end goal. Ensuring people are not at risk is what we should be after. So let’s get started with the conversation…

Have a great week,

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from the road this week in Barnsley, England. Before we get started with the topic for this week, I wanted to let you know that we have identified the dates for ProAct Safety’s Annual Conference. If you would like to mark it on your calendar, it will be the 6^th – 8^th of April 2010. I hope you can make it out, as we would love to see you there!

So for this week, we have an 8-step recommendation for responding to an accident after implementing Behavior-Based Safety.

1.      Set Realistic Expectations

2.      Stress the Importance

3.      Stress The sense of Vulnerability

4.      Ask the question do we have the behavior or precaution on our checklist that could have helped prevent or minimize the injury?

5.      Ask what is the percent safe for that precaution?

6.      Ask could we have seen this coming?

7.      Ask how long until we can get on top of this?

8.      Ask what can I do as a facilitator and coach to help you help us improve safety?

So Terry and I are going to discuss all of these steps in length. With that let’s jump into the discussion about these guidelines…

The audio file can be found at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com, or you can subscribe on iTunes. 

Have a great week,

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety

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