Safety Culture Excellence®

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRVnyvRe4rg]

I hope you enjoy and have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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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 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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Greetings, this podcast recorded while on the road in Sheffield, England. For this 138th podcast, I’d like to share an article I wrote called, “An Unlikely Tool to Improve Safety”. It was published 10 May 2010 in my monthly column for Canadian Occupational Safety. The 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: www.safetycultureexcellence.com.

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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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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Greetings, this podcast recorded in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Last week Terry and I talked about the four (4) part model, FILM – Focus, Influence, Listen and Measure. If you haven’t listened to last week’s podcast I highly encourage you to go back and do so first, prior to continuing with this topic as this one builds on last week’s model. This week we sat down and discussed the four primary factors that influence risk taking.  I hope you will be able to find a way to apply these models to your organization. If you need any assistance, please feel free to contact us. All of our contact information can be found at www.ProActSafety.com. 

This audio file can be found at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings, this podcast recorded in Canton, Ohio. This week Terry and I would like to share with you an advanced model for improving safety. This is a model that has helped hundreds of international organizations advance beyond traditional safety, to reach and sustain a level of excellence in safety. First, I would like to challenge you with something. As you will hear how this four part model applies to safety, consider the impact this would have on other operational performance areas such as quality, on-time delivery, productivity and others.  If you would like a graph of this in a PowerPoint slide, please email us at podcast @ proactsafety.com.

In next week’s podcast we will expand on this topic by discussing a follow-up model that sheds light on the four primary factors that influence risk taking. Thank you for tuning in each week and remember these topics come from the questions we receive while on assignment and from you the listeners. So, keep them coming! 

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings! This podcast recorded in Omaha Nebraska. This week I’d like to provide a recording of a white paper that was written by Terry, back in 1998. Terry was one of the first actual practitioners of behavioral approaches back in the early 1980’s, when he was the Director of Training at a little organization called The Coca-Cola Company. He created some of the world’s first corporate roll outs of what is now called Behavior-Based Safety. After successfully rolling this out throughout the company, he left Coca-Cola and joined the consulting ranks in 1996 and started our firm, ProAct Safety. Being one of the world’s first actual business practitioners of behavioral approaches provided him a different perspective than those who had respectfully (at the time) only had the academic experience.

If you have listened to the other 93 podcasts by now you have heard us reference the difference of theory and practice multiple times. When 1998 came about Terry had already customized many different approaches for many of the firm’s first clients and what he was seeing throughout the world when looking at the academic methodologies really concerned him, as did it concern the unions and many executives as well. So terry wrote a white paper in 1998 called, “Why Behavior-Based Safety Must Change Or Perish.” I would like to present that paper to you today. While yes, it is a little dated and our philosophy has greatly been enhanced, I believe it provides some understanding of how our firm’s viewpoint came to be. I hope you enjoy!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Why Behavior-Based Safety Must Change Or Perish.

And what the new model will look like.

By Terry L. Mathis

1998

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS), as it has come to be called, has been a very successful intervention for reducing accidents.  Many organizations have tried it with success and others would have tried it except for its high costs both in terms of external and internal resources.  Others have chosen deliberately not to use Behavior-Based Safety precisely because of these high costs.

In today’s climate of lean manufacturing and downsizing, Behavior-Based Safety is becoming a dinosaur in real danger of extinction.  Like dinosaurs, Behavior-Based Safety has changed relatively little since its inception in the mid 1980s.  It is artificially expensive to hire expert consultants and the methodology is very liberal with the use of workers who must be excused from their regular jobs to do the “process.” Behavior-Based Safety has been effective but not efficient.

If Behavior-Based Safety is going to survive, must less thrive in the current business environment, it is going to have to change in some real ways.  An examination of current methodology reveals a number of ways in which it could change to better meet the demands of the business world as it has become.

Behavior-Based Safety Must Become “Lean”

The amount of money spent on external consultants often wanes in comparison to the amount spent on internal resources necessary for Behavior-Based Safety.  Sites have calculated as much as 1,000 work/hours of training per 100 employees to get the process started and 100-200 work/hours per month to keep it going.  A typical Behavior-Based Safety process has a steering committee or team which receives days of training and workshop activities to get the process started and several hours per month for the term of the process.  In addition to this team, observers are selected from the workforce who can include as much as 100% of the workforce.  These observers may take from one half hour per week to three hours per week to complete their observations.  Many sites give observers overtime to complete observations.

Lean workforces struggle to spare this many people away from their regular duties.  Experimental sites have been able to accomplish Behavior-Based Safety with far fewer people and still produce dramatic results.  Leadership teams/committees can be downsized or replaced with facilitators.  Observations can be performed in larger blocks by fewer observers which reduces preparation and observation trip time.  Checklists can be focused on fewer behaviors or precautions, which speeds and simplifies the observations.  Feedback can be separated from observations or limited and targeted to save additional time. 

Behavior-Based Safety Must Become Union Friendly

Unions have been among the critics of behavioral safety initiatives claiming that it tends to blame workers for accidents and provide an avenue for management to abdicate its rightful role in safety leadership.  These claims are truer at some sites than others.  Some sites have done remarkably better at making Behavior-Based Safety a fact finding rather than a fault finding process.  Some site leaders have taken an active role in safety leadership and others have stepped back hoping that Behavior-Based Safety would solve their safety problems.

Experimental Behavior-based Safety processes have successfully tried several techniques to win union support: 

•  Omit all behaviors from the checklist that overlap with safety rules and procedures.  This eliminates the danger of using Behavior-Based Safety for disciplinary purposes.  Everything on the checklist is discretionary and non-punishable.
• Separate the observations from the feedback.  Have an observer “sweep” the organization for measurement and use this data to focus peer coaching only in areas where improvements are needed.  Some sites have even used salaried observers in this role to eliminate the perception that a climate of union members spying on other union members would be developed. Union members were used as coaches, but not to gather data.
• Site management only views the identified, prioritized items provided to them by the hourly team members to fix the problems and not just to fix the blame.
• Observations are used to find unsafe conditions as well as concerning behaviors.

Even non-union sites have benefited from these and other techniques.

Behavior-Based Safety Must Become Professional

One of the weaknesses of traditional Behavior-Based Safety is that it uses amateurs to perform expert duties.  This is especially true in the area of data analysis and problem solving.  Employee teams/committees have been charged with analyzing the behavioral observation data (sometimes coordinating it with ongoing accident and near-miss data) and using their findings to continuously improve safety and solve identified problems.  Most employee teams have no expertise in data analysis or training in statistics and fail to accurately identify and/or prioritize their safety problems and opportunities.  Some teams spend hours pouring over data and fail to really understand what they are looking at.  Even teams who identify problems are seldom empowered to solve them and workers hesitate to take issues to managers and ask for help. 

In new Behavior-Based Safety experimental sites where the trust levels and culture supports, the data is analyzed by someone with both the training and the expertise to identify issues and distribute data to the right person or level at the site that can potentially solve the problem.  Most Behavior-Based Safety processes identify a lot more than concerning practices or behaviors.  They identify systems issues, unsafe conditions, training deficits, organizational and cultural issues, problems with management and supervision, and even safety rules and procedures that don’t work.  Much of these issues are never identified or addressed by employee teams and the opportunity costs of such omissions are significant.

The traditional thinking is that the data must been seen only by workers to keep it anonymous and separated from discipline.  Many techniques have been developed to solve this problem and still allow for more expert analysis and use of the observational data.   The same issues that apply to data analysis and problem solving often apply to observation and feedback and innovative sites are finding ways to improve observation and feedback expertise, while reducing resource requirements.

 Behavior-Based Safety Must Include True Safety Leadership

Behavior-Based Safety has focused on changing what it has called the safety “culture“.  The traditional Behavior-Based Safety vision of this ideal culture is at the heart of the problem.  The ideal Behavior-Based Safety culture is self-directed with almost no management intervention and is replete with workers who have time to effectively communicate with each other about safety issues.  Behavior-Based Safety has a leadership team which meets independently and a team or teams of observers who regularly take time away from their jobs.  Managers are asked to support and not interfere with the leadership team or steering committee while supervisors are charged with “empowering” the observers.

In reality, many of the Behavior-Based Safety processes have stopped far short of creating a new culture and have instead produced a new cult.  The workers involved in Behavior-Based Safety create a new clique in the organization that enjoys immunity from normal management and supervisory scrutiny.  Managers find they have diminished ability to influence the safety priorities and activities of the workers.  The gap between leaders and workers widens.

Any safety culture should involve all levels in the organization and use the levels in the way they can best serve.  Leaders should establish goals and direction and workers should use their abilities to find better and safer ways to accomplish organizational goals.  All safety efforts should be integrated and great care should be used not to create separate activities that separate and alienate levels of the organization from each other.  Even some of the Behavior-Based Safety experts who purported the traditional approach are recanting and acknowledging the importance of leadership in successful Behavior-Based Safety processes.

Conclusions

Sites that are looking at implementing Behavior-Based Safety should consider alternatives and not just look at the traditional approaches.  Some of the innovations could make Behavior-Based Safety a viable process for sites where traditional Behavior-Based Safety simply would not work, or fit.

Sites that already have a Behavior-Based Safety process are encouraged to consider putting their processes on a diet.  Even if it currently works, it may be too large and ineffective.  Look at innovative ways to downsize and realign resources.  Use site expertise in data analysis.  Look for innovative ways to streamline observations and make your process more union friendly and supported.  Above all, keep leadership in an active role in the process and make the process integrate into your existing organization and safety efforts. Your Behavior-Based Safety process is not extinct yet!

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Greetings, recording this week in Saratoga, New York. For the podcast this week, Terry and I answer the following client’s question: “We had a Steering Team meeting last week and a concern about data analysis was raised and I have an action item to contact you for your thoughts. During our previous data analysis the least percent safe days of the week were Thursday and Friday, and the least percent safe times were between 6 am and 9 am. So as a Steering Team, we communicated this and tried to target observations during those days and times.  During this past data analysis, the least percent Safe days were Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and the least percent safe time was 1 pm. So this is where we are focusing our observations.

Is the improvement due to our target observations or is this something that will always be a moving target? Or does it even matter as long as we are communicating?” – Kelly

Thanks Kelly, before we get into the recording, just a quick announcement I’ll be at the Incident Prevention Conference in Louisville, Kentucky the week of 04 October 2009 and Terry and I both will be at the National Safety Council’s Conference in Orlando the week of 25 October 2009. If you happen to be at either or both, please stop by our booth or one of our talks and say hello. So without further delay, let’s jump right into the discussion.

I hope you enjoy this week’s recording!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings recording this week in Omaha, NE.  “In the early 1980s many safety professionals were excited about the possibilities of using new advances in the behavioral sciences to improve organizational safety. Among the technologies being investigated was the idea of behavioral observation. Behavior is by definition “an observable act” and therefore measurable by workplace observation. If a statistically-significant connection could be made between certain behaviors and accident probabilities, measuring these behaviors through observation might provide a more accurate measurement of workplace safety.” – Terry Mathis

In the May 2009 edition of Industrial Engineer, another one of Terry’s articles was published. We received some great feedback from the article, including a request to record it here for the subscribers of Safety Culture Excellence. So the podcast this week is a reading of the recent article “Hard Measurements for Soft Science: Behavior-Based Safety Has Evolved” by Terry Mathis. If you would like to see the actual article please visit either the Industrial Engineer Magazine website at www.iienet2.org or our website at www.ProActSafety.com and click on the Insights tab.

If you are interested in a behavioral approach to operational improvement this article will definitely provide a better understanding. So here we go…

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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