Behavioral Safety Observations: A Two Dimension Approach

Observational checklists are an important component of every behavior-based safety process, but there is a lot of variability in the items, the length of the observation list, and how the observations are accomplished.

• Length – some observational checklists are several pages long; they are more like safety audits than behavioral observations, while other lists have as few as 3 or 4 behaviors.
• Items – many observational lists have warnings, instructions, and practices; some have very specific behaviors – ergonomically precise.
• Lists vary in focus; many check every possible combination of possibilities while other lists focus on at-risk behaviors that statistically have proven to be lead to employee injuries.
• Some observations lists require 30 minutes plus to complete while the short behavioral list can take less than 30 seconds.

So what is the best type of list to have? What gets the best results?

The data is inconclusive; every type of checklist has the potential to reduce injuries – and 15 years of highly variable in-house and out-house checklists – that have led to favorable results, indicates that the checklist itself is not the most critical factor in BBS process success.

In my opinion, every behavior-based safety process should have two types of observations checklists:

• A thorough audit that incorporates all the conditions, precautions, behaviors and practices relevant to the department or work group. These audits would be about 30 minutes long, comprehensive, and performed on a frequent basis.
  
• A two or three behavior checklist that observers keep in their back pocket which they can whip out and check off in 10 or 15 seconds; a checklist focused on critical at-risk behaviors that the work group upgrades as the work environment requires.

The first, lengthy observational audits should be scheduled; the second, opportunistic behavioral observations should be spontaneous – when the work requires certain at-risk behaviors to be performed, or when employees are working together and can do quick observations without interfering with the tasks at hand.

The two-dimensional observation strategy allows you to obtain both comprehensive data and a high number of unannounced observations – for increased data validity. Announcing observations has always been the preferred method; it eliminates trust issues and allows employees to become comfortable with being “watched” while they work.

The fact that employees behave differently when they know they are being watched has been eschewed by consulting providers and broadly in the literature, but anyone with commonsense knows that it corrupts the data and makes the value of the observation questionable.

If you participatively engage your employees in spontaneous, brief observations (anonymous of course), you can collect hundreds of data points per week and the data is more reliable - it reflects the way employees are really working. Using this type of observations, you see employees doing their work naturally – not self-consciously. It is imperative that you get the permission and involvement of all employees in this process.

The short, critical, in-the-pocket observation list combined with the longer, more thorough audit type observations enriches and deepens your observation process. There is no absolute authority on observations, and for the last 20 years announced lengthy observations has been the method of choice.

The Critical-Behavior, in-the-pocket observation process has been used successfully in dozens of applications and the results have indicated that it is the observational process of choice when you want to impact employee safety quickly. One key element of the variable observation approach is to make sure employees are empowered to change the behaviors as needed. This ensures participation, and the robust relevance of the behaviors.

Many companies have overlooked true behavioral observations because they assume that safety is a complex topic and there are many factors that contribute to at-risk behavior – and I agree. But the belief that you have to have one or the other – that you cannot do both for increased impact – is overlooking the realities of the observational environment and its effect on employee behavior.

Behavior-Based Safety Leadership for Dummies

Leadership gurus have made a fortune defining what leadership is and most men and women aspire to be identified as representative of the elevated stature associated with being a “leader.” Leaders have followers – they are purportedly charismatic and transformational. Managers have subordinates – they are transactional and influence through the authority provided them.

One recognizes that a transformational leader may also function as a manager, but the average manager cannot hope to attend a “leadership” course and learn how to be charismatic – how to inspire others to “follow” you. I hate to be cynical about something that on the surface appears to be a noble objective, but it is hard to overlook the facts: over the last thirty years the role of manager has been defined and redefined by book writers, consultants, and academics as facilitators, coaches, mentors, team leaders, servants, now leaders. The emphasis on leadership is likely to change its theme at any time.

I have been a behavior-change consultant for over 35 years, and during that time I have seen many trends, fads and fashions in the world of management training and development. The most interesting phenomenon is the corporate naiveté demonstrated by a willingness to buy every new leadership analysis, profile, style, inventory and assessment product that hits the market. The more expensive, arcane, esoteric, complex, and inaccessible – the more likely senior executives are to pay for it.

A few of the well know products include Blake and Moutons “Managerial Grid,” the “Myers Briggs Type Indicator,” the “Keirsey Temperament Sorter,” and the “Hogan Personality Inventory.” But every leadership theorist, business school, and consulting company has their own proprietary product that will place your personality snugly within their well-defined, assessment criteria. Fortune 100 companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on personality inventories hoping to predict the leader/manager performance of their employees.

Most of us are not transformational, inspirational leaders; we are men and women who have authority thrust upon us by virtue of our performance, experience, and skill sets. So, to begin with the cold, hard truth I don’t think any of us are going to become charismatic leaders no matter how hard we try.

I do think we can learn to change our own behavior and the behavior of others – in fact we do that all the time, but we don’t do it consciously and constructively. We are constantly inadvertently reinforcing (encouraging) behavior in others that we abhor and extinguishing behavior in others that we would like to see more of.

Because behavioral principles are rather boring (except for the principle of positive reinforcement that has been abused and hyperbolized until it is dismissed as complimenting people to try to get them to do things for us), people rush to sexier material – like Freud, Jung, and Maslow, none of whose theories can be easily utilized in the office or on the shop floor.

In my 35 years of management consulting (behavior change, organizational change) I’ve made one or two simple observations that explain why Safety Leadership has become such a big, complex industry.

1. Contemporary Senior Leadership has no training or education in the basic principles of behavior change – in how you arrange consequences to affect the frequency of specific, individual behaviors. They typically think that the phrase “positive reinforcement,” was invented by Human Resources as a euphemism for “being nice to people to encourage them to work harder.”

In business school, they were taught some personality-driven, explanatory models for human behavior – old, outdated stuff by Maslow and Hertzberg that they quickly dismissed as effete and academic – divorced from the realities of cost and profit. These cognitive models usually culminate into one take-away: You can’t change people. Their personality is hard-wired from genetics, early learning, and neurological predisposition. The dissonance and contention between schools of psychology in regard to the causes for human behavior encourages distrust in the change models they promote.

Senior leaders don’t approach individual or organizational behavior change from a set of principle or a science; they use personal experience to guide them. Failing, making mistakes, appearing stupid, losing position to a peer competitor, not getting a promotion or raise, not being the smartest guy in the room – you work hard to avoid all the negatives. Nobody, not even your father, ever praised you – gave you positive feedback to encourage you in any specific way.

I’m not being cynical; I’m pointing out the philosophical-psychological-pragmatics of the business world. When someone has a “job,” you can use programs and incentives to get them to do more. When someone has a “career,” you don’t have to use incentives to get them to do this or that – they are self-driven; they bust their butts to do as much as they can – within the natural limitations of talent and cerebral endowment.

So most senior leaders don’t really believe that someone’s behaviors can be changed using differential consequences – positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement (please don’t confuse negative reinforcement with punishment; Google it – there is a big difference.)

2. Most Senior Leaders don’t know how to make change initiatives work. Organizational change – evolving an organization’s effectiveness by capturing information from its market environment – is a poorly perfected art. It is certainly not a science, because organizational change initiatives are not implemented using scientific methodology – data-basing change, using empirical evidence in pre and post analyzes to determine if training, development, education, processes, models or methods have really improved human performance.

Many leaders seem to think that supporting an initiative means writing a check to pay for the consultants.

Behavior-Based Safety leadership means behaving in ways that demonstrate that the value of safety and the importance of a BBS initiative are primary to the business – for good business and because the health and well-being of the people who work for you are more important than getting something done unsafely to make more money.

It sounds simple – and it is. The difficulty is that it is hard for anyone to tell leaders what to do. Everyone in the organization knows that leaders communicate their values by what they talk about, listen to, laugh at, promote, bonus, demote, and fire. So if they do all those things in regard to safety and your BBS initiative then everybody knows that it matters and they get on board.

Leaders reinforce, encourage, strengthen, cultivate, and incent the things (behavior, results) that they attend to in a favorable way. They smile or ask questions, or tell stories, or make decisions that favor, or bring up the subject often in public and private. Of course they can more formally include some language about it in the mission statement or in the annual report or in the CEO’s newsletter, but those platforms are generally considered to be rhetorical incubators which are meaningless compared to the pragmatics of who leaders smile at and what they become angry about.

So if you want to be a strong safety leader who creates a legacy around safety you just have to demonstrate the same obsession around the topic that you have for golf or wing-shooting. You attend meetings (sometimes at early or late hours) of safety committees and training classes. You make decisions that favor safe equipment, materials, engineering, and purchases. You do a behavioral observation, you look at the safety data, and you make sure that you keep your eye on the safety process.

One other point – you measure your behavior, just like we do in behavioral observations of employees at work. With your peers, sit down in a leadership meeting and come up with a list of things that you will do each week to support your company’s safety management system and its behavior-based safety initiative. Things that will ensure everyone knows it is a primary value. “I will attend a safety committee meeting at the Covington, Georgia plant next week. I will do a “Walkaround;” go out on the shop floor and talk to people about our BBS initiative and their thoughts, feelings and ideas about it.”

Make a list; attach points to each item; weight them if you want to prioritize an item or two, and then agree to review your list and your score with your peers each month. Hold yourself and your peers accountable for doing the things – the behaviors that will communicate that safety is the most important responsibility of your job as a leader and that of your managers and that of your supervisors. It is important enough for you to track your support. Do you walk the walk?

I know that it is more fun to take a personality inventory and review the findings. You want to know how you are diagnosed by one of these pseudo-clinical tests; much more fun than getting up at 4:00 A.M. to attend a BBS safety committee meeting. But, there is comfort in knowing what works and what doesn’t; what is real from what is theoretical. Stand up, show up, and speak up about safety. Forget the charisma workshop .

7 Reasons Why Your Behavior-Based Safety Process is Flopping

In the last 15 years thousands of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) processes have been implemented worldwide. BBS is the most commonly used process to obtain order of magnitude improvements in injury reduction. It is participative, preventive, and positive; it is the Six Sigma – the TQM for safety. Its core components are so powerful that it is hard to imagine how you can implement it and not get great results.

I’ve been selling BBS systems for 10 years, and I don’t have an agenda relative to methodology; I just want happy clients. So I listen when the people I talk to are frustrated; the companies who have attempted to implement BBS and the process foundered and stalled. Or, they are 5 years into a process that everyone has lost interest in and they want to talk about a “booster,” or something to “give us a shot in the arm.”

Amazingly, most people who have a failed system don’t have a clue why it isn’t working. Often, they will bring in another BBS provider (consulting company), in hopes that a new approach with new language will “work.” The employees get cynical, because the new process requires changes that don’t seem to make a difference. The average front line employee sees similar systems with different buzzwords; and they are right.

What went wrong? Why are there so many dissatisfied BBS clients, abandoned systems, bastardized hybrids, and home grown catastrophes? I can think of a few reasons, but I’m not going to pull out the worn-out “maybe you were not ready,” cliché. Most companies have decent safety management systems, and most companies are ready for “the right BBS process.”

Failures and lukewarm BBS systems all have a few common roots:

1. You Did Not Do Your Homework – there are several legitimate BBS providers, but there are also a lot of pseudo-BBS providers. Just because a company is large and has a big market presence does not mean they can implement a good BBS process. They just know how to sell and they let their brand do the talking for them.

Similarly, just because some guy went through several site implementations at the company where he used to work does not make him a good consultant, or someone who is qualified to advise other companies. When I say do your homework, I mean learn something about the core principles of BBS and compare that to the potential provider’s process.

Does the provider actually know anything about behavioral science – the research-based principles of human behavior? Are their consultants knowledgeable about the science of behavior-change, or are they safety professionals that have seen a lot of BBS? You might think that doesn’t matter, but when you discover that your employees are still taking risks and your supervisors are still favoring productivity and their paperwork over safety it’s good to have someone to ask…why?

2. You Got an Off-the-Shelf BBS System Instead of a Customized Process – the large BBS providers have standardized processes. Most of the time their consultants have been thoroughly trained in using a specific methodology accompanied by specific tools and printed material. The company usually has a book written by an authority that establishes their credibility.

When you have lots of pre-printed material, copyrights, trademarks,
and patents, you have inflexibility. They can’t change their process to
accommodate the nuances of your company, culture, or operation. They
tend to force-fit the exigencies of your safety management system into
pre-packaged assumptions and solutions. They can not do something
differently – even if they know it works better – if it contradicts
something that has been published in their sacred text…the book that
established their credibility in the first place.

3. No Pickles, No Lettuce – Special Orders Do Upset Us – You bought the big name and now they own you. Everybody in your industry knows that you use “X” company as your BBS provider. You have added a new appendage to your safety management system; “X’s” BBS process. It has so much notoriety, that your own safety process has lost its identity. It’s like marrying a movie star; you lose your identity – you’ve become Mr. or Mrs. Celebrity.

What you really needed was a customized process; you needed a knowledgeable, experienced BBS consultant to help you integrate the key BBS components into your existing safety management system. You should have a personalized system – adapted to your nation, region, industry, site, and work group functions. You needed input; an opportunity to learn the basics and make some of the decisions about how, when, and what.

But, the big provider used their clout to shout you down. They’ve done this dozens (even hundreds) of times before and you have to do it they way they want. There is only one way; their way. It is only later…many dollars later that you become aware that you could have screwed up for a lot less money if you had done it yourself.

But now it’s too late; they have you encircled by their lawyers. You can’t do this or that without their approval; if you do, you may be stealing their proprietary material or pirating their intellectual capital. If you want to use another provider in another plant, the big players may have to give you their permission.

4. You Bought Complexity Instead of Basic Tools – yeah, but all that detail looked so inviting. All that stuff. It was impressive; there were so many training meetings, team meetings, tools, books, continuing education classes, annual conferences, software upgrades – it was overwhelmingly. You think, it must be good, because it takes so much time.

Nobody told you (even though your intuition should have) that complex and expensive does not equal effective. Everybody thinks, “It’s just me; I think this is all too complex because I’m not smart enough to grasp it all.” You thought you were allergic to something when your eyes began to water while they were explaining the data software.

No, your intuition was on the money. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean you are simple. It may have too many pieces because it favors the providers selling process or their sales price. A BBS process can be implemented for 1/4th of the cost that some of the bigger providers charge.

5. Your Leaders Are Not Involved – I don’t mean they just wrote a check. I mean they are out doing observations, talking to frontline employees about BBS, attending Safety Committee meetings, and asking questions about progress and participation.

Leadership involvement needs to be tracked, measured; it needs to be public and they need to be accountability. The best BBS implementations have obsessed leadership; they talk the talk and walk the walk. They won’t let it fail because it is number one on their values list.

Leadership involvement communicates that the company cares about the well-being of their employees. It lets the public know that the organization has a heart. Customers like companies with a heart – with compassion, caring and respect for their employees.

Each leader needs to have a self-developed, self-managed checklist of specific support behaviors that they use to track themselves against – with goals and public transparency. Leaders need to meet and talk about their individual scores…and hold themselves accountable for doing the things that will make safety and your BBS process the key value in the company.

6. You Did Not Know When to Ask for Help – your gut tells you that the BBS process is not working. Employees are not enthusiastic – not even involved. Meetings are not being held – observation sheets are being pencil whipped. You don’t trust the data. Your process is dying; atrophy is obvious but you keep looking for a quick fix.

What you need to do is find an experienced free-lance or small group of credentialed BBS implementers and pay one of them to come in for a day and take a look around; talk to them and let them talk to the employees. There is no substitute for third party objectivity. There are plenty of experienced BBS consultants who have implemented dozens of BBS processes who are willing to spend a few days with you to give you some guidance.

Allowing your employees to meet with a BBS consultant and do some course correction and problem solving can energize them. It allows them to make changes their experience has identified – to make improvements that will customize the process to the work, the company, and the culture.

7. You Don’t Know How to Deliver Effective Feedback, Recognition, and Celebrate Success
What leadership attends to, what they talk about positively, and what they reward becomes the key values in an organization. Most supervisors don’t know how to interact with employees in a way that energizes critical behaviors – that helps performers identify value added behavior and change behavior that is not working.

Providing positive feedback during observations is critical to behavior change. Recognizing the people who are doing observations, and celebrating the up and down stream data improvements is important to creating energy and enthusiasm. Employees need to know that their behavior makes a difference. In some companies BBS involvement is a condition of employment.

Human behavior is determined by consequences; what pays off for you or what does not determines what you are going to do on the job. If your BBS system has not incorporated the basic principles of behavioral technology – of behavior change, then you are unlikely to be successful at evolving and maintaining your BBS process over the long haul. Celebrating and rewarding safe behavior is essential.

Take the Pain Out of Job Feedback Discussions

One of the most difficult aspects of leading, managing, and supervising is providing performers with negative feedback. Most people report public speaking as their number one fear; for anyone in a management role, providing one-on-one negative feedback holds that number one spot. Many managers not only avoid feedback, they do not do provide it at all.

Annual or bi-annual performance reviews are hated by everyone—employee and manager alike. In many companies, performance reviews and salary reviews are synonymous; the performance review provides the rationale for whether one receives a raise and how much that raise is going to be. It is often humorously acknowledged that everyone is on his or her best behavior for a few weeks prior to performance review time.

Generally, supervisors dread the performance review like the plague. For a supervisor or manager, the term “performance review” connotes uncomfortable past experiences. Even the smoothest performance reviews are accompanied by disagreement and tense discussions. The really hairy ones can have confrontations, emotional arguments, and disagreements that can do permanent damage to employee engagement.

Performance reviews are anachronisms. The usual outcome is that employee and supervisor become aversive to each other for a month or two. Of course, the culprit is negative feedback. The employee does not want to hear it (it is aversive by definition), and the supervisor does not want to deliver it (and usually is not skilled in the art.)

The purpose of the performance review is to change behavior, and the annual performance reviews are undeniably ineffective in obtaining that end. Real behavior change is the result of daily interactions between manager and employee. At best, the performance review focuses on the effects of employee behavior on some performance result. Employee behavior is not changed in a review; it is changed in the work setting.

Secondly, because the experience is so aversive to the manager, he or she tends to stay away from negative feedback as much as possible. The end result of their avoidance behavior is that performance feedback important to the employee’s job success is suppressed. Many employees have been demoted or fired with little or no forewarning that they were not giving satisfaction in their jobs.

Managers and supervisors should provide their subordinates with constructive feedback on a regular basis—feedback about behavior, not just results. Employee performance—job results, are the outcome of numerous contributory behaviors that can be observed and identified by a knowledgeable supervisor—one trained in Behavior Management. The management of employee behavior—increasing the frequency of value–added behaviors and decreasing the frequency of dysfunctional or unnecessary behaviors—is critical to maximizing the performance potential of an employee.

Learning how to provide constructive feedback—particular corrective feedback, is the scorecard for performance management efficacy. If a supervisor cannot address behavioral discrepancies, then the employee can not improve their job performance. Most managers react to results, a downstream measure of human performance. Behavior is the controlling factor for all performance results. Understanding how to provide tactful corrective feedback for undesirable behaviors is as important as the prudent and efficient use of positive performance feedback..

How do you make bad news palatable?—you have to be relaxed. Tension is an incubator for reactivity and emotionalism. With the proper preparation, you can comfortably engage an employee even when you know that you are going to be discussing some of their performance deficiencies. Preparation requires that you remind yourself that the purpose of your discussion and the feedback is to “help” the employee.

If you repeat to yourself that your purpose is to facilitate, to coach, to help the employee—with truth and tact and legitimate concern, then you will relax because you have identified yourself as a positive agent in the process. A supervisor-employee performance discussion where both parties recognize the supervisor’s intent is to help, not hurt, can be one of the most reinforcing experiences in one’s work life.

It is entirely appropriate to begin a feedback session or performance review with positive, personal topics. Start the event by relaxing both the manager and the employee; talk about some topics that are reinforcing to the employee. Create a positive context from which to begin the discussion. Remember, you will not change any targeted performance behavior in a feedback session or performance review. What you can do is provide clear identification of the behavior you would like to see changed (increased in frequency or modified in some way), or the new behavior you want or perhaps a behavior you would like to see stopped.

At the very least, the feedback dialog will clearly identify behavior that is aversive to you as the manager. Most employees will attempt to avoid behaving in ways that they are certain their manager or supervisor does not like.

It is important to use provisional language in performance review; avoid categorical statements. Many supervisors pridefully affect an aggressive persona regarding employee feedback. They brag about “telling it like it is,” or “being direct and honest,” (often a euphemism for being callously critical.)

After you have had a few moments of positive conversation, you should begin the feedback dialog by pointing out the employee's strengths; “Bob, the quality and accuracy of your report writing is extremely high. I always feel that any job you do will be finished on time.” Beginning with positives is a fair and honest way to start the discussion. The supervisor has a chance to relax and the employee is not guarded. It is a good beginning.

Don’t confuse a feedback session, the purpose of which is to change specific behavior, with a problem solving discussion in which you have to talk about something that went wrong—a discussion in which you are talking with the employee to determine what caused a problem. You can stop and say, “What went wrong yesterday with the backup system?” without having to follow the guidelines for a feedback dialog.

At the appropriate moment in your feedback dialog, you can state your behavioral concern: “Jim, sometimes I feel like you do the work yourself when you could delegate it to someone else.”

Notice the use of the words “sometimes,” and “could,” to soften the comment. It would be easy to be categorical and preemptive as—“Jim, you always do the work yourself when you should be delegating it to other people.”

The first statement is likely to be thoughtfully received, while the second may create a defensive reaction. If the employee has, in the past, successfully backed down the supervisor by expressing outrage or emotional disagreement, he or she has been positively reinforced for that behavior (a good example of how positive reinforcement often encourages behavior we do not want) and may exhibit that behavior in this situation regardless of the diplomacy of the comment.

The manager's tone, body language, and the words selected (their connotations) effect the emotions of both the manager and the employee. The emotions need to be managed before you can deal with the performer’s behavior. If the manager uses accusatory words or blunt, critical words it makes the employee defensive and angry--which in turn shuts down his or her receptivity to important behavioral feedback.

If the manager understands Behavior Management, then he or she is prepared for the employee's reactivity. Leaders and managers who have been taught Behavior Management are aware of how their words and non-verbal behavior are acting as positive reinforcers and punishers in a performance review This training allows the manager to selectively reinforce the behavior of the employee during a feedback session--in real time. Although job behavior cannot be changed in a review setting, the employee's verbal behavior within that setting can be changed effectively.

As you identify a behavior that needs changing, like “Jim, sometimes I feel like you do the work yourself when you could delegate it to someone else,” then ask the employee a question about their response to your comment--a question like, “How do you feel about that?” or “Do your observations of your behavior agree with mine?” To ask an employee to observe their own behavior establishes a strong participative discussion environment; the employee is empowered to become an active participant in his or her performance evaluation. Most employees will react positively to this opportunity and eagerly participate in their own evaluation.

In this instance, Jim might say, “I am aware that I tend to do too much of the work myself, when I should be assigning it too someone else. It’s a habit I need to break.”

At this point, the manager can reinforce the response honestly (if you don’t feel it, don’t say it; the employee can tell the difference) by saying something like—“That was a good insight into your own behavior Jim. Are there any other behaviors you've targeted to work on?”

This response allows the employee to gain control of his own evaluation and make self-observations that his manager can reinforce. This partnership in performance management pairs the manager as a strong positive stimulus--as a reinforcer, and encourages Jim to take a self-management role in his own performance management.

One objective of Participative Behavior Management is to create a workplace in which managers and employees partner to reinforce and recognize value added behavior, another is to provide a employees with an empowered process that allows them to identify and influence their own behavior. We want employees to know how to identify and manage their own behavior; that is the ultimate objective of Participative Behavior Management..