Applications of Behavioral Technology - Before BBS: Part 1

Behavior-based safety (BBS) processes, borrow heavily from the science of behavior analysis, using behavioral tools to decrease at-risk behavior and increase the frequency of safe behavior. Many behavioral tools, included in but also in addition to those used in BBS, enable organizations to influence the behaviors that drive overall business success. In fact, the tools of behavioral technology have been applied in a wide variety of business and industrial settings, consistently improving human performance by at least 20 to 30 percent.

It is time for organizations to fully utilize the behavioral technology that is the foundation of their behavior-based safety processes. Organizations could and should maximize the investment made in BBS by expanding, adapting and applying behavioral technology and employee observational skills to the company’s strategic operational outcomes – productivity, quality, Six Sigma, Lean Principles, Wellness, and so forth.

Behavioral tools, employee participation, observational skills, steering committee involvement can all be utilized to build upon and add value to your current BBS process. A systematic integration of behavioral tools into all areas of operations would not only improve performance and your training investment, but would also strengthen your existing BBS process.

How Were Behavioral Tools First Applied?

The first applications of behavior analysis in the work environment occurred in the early 1970s. Ed Feeney at Emery Air Freight, Richard Mallott at Western Michigan University, and Aubrey Daniels at Behavioral Systems applied behavioral technology to organizational performance problems and attained significant improvements. Key performance objectives for a business unit were targeted. The variables selected included quality, productivity, timeliness, error rate, cost control and turnover.

Behavioral technology brought some tools to management practices. The notion that we should be managing behavior “what people do at work,” instead of trying to change their personalities (using inspirational rhetoric to change attitudes), was a new one. Leaders, managers, and supervisors did not know what a “behavior” was or was not. The behavior of “putting on your safety glasses,” is clear and obvious today; 30 years ago safety management was not that precise. Effort was dedicated to changing an employee’s attitude about safety – getting him or her to “think safety,” and to be “conscientious” about safety.

Other ideas that behavioral technology brought to management was concepts like “positive feedback;” providing employees with specific, timely information about what they “did right” that would improve safety or performance. Until behavioral technology became popular, the only feedback employees received was information about what they were doing wrong.

Finally, the concept of positive reinforcement – the idea that value added behavior and good performance should be recognized, rewarded, celebrated, and acknowledged was unheard of 40 years ago. Safety recognition was stalled on downstream indicators and results. No one understood that when an employee was rewarded for “doing something right,” they would tend to repeat that behavior.

In the 1970s, we trained managers and supervisors in the science of behavior analysis, and then they created action plans to apply behavioral tools systematically. They identified important behaviors that would improve quality and productivity and reduce waste. We initiated performance measurement, and graphically presented daily performance feedback. When performance improved they regularly and promptly delivered recognition and reward to employees.

These early applications brought significant performance improvement in a short period of time. The introduction of a performance management system and positive recognition and reward created almost instant operations improvement when used correctly. Turnover was cut in half, absenteeism reduced by 70%, productivity increased by 40%, machine running time increased from 75% to 98%. Results so staggeringly successful, that Roger Milliken, the owner of Milliken textiles systematically applied behavioral technology in 60 of his plants. Milliken later became the first Malcolm Baldridge Award winner.

Although some of these methods are practiced in today’s business environment, keep in mind that measurement and feedback on behavior were conspicuously missing from most organizations in the 1970s. Also, most managers and supervisors were not trained in managing performance and tried to motivate workers by threats and intimidation. The transition from "my way or the highway," management styles to "Reward and Recognition," based management has been a long one - full of missteps and wrong turns.

More about this in Part 2.

Implementing Behavior-Based Safety Using Tangible Rewards

Behavior-based safety (BBS) is becoming the worldwide initiative-of-choice for moving a safety management system to its ultimate level of effectiveness. BBS has been implemented in the United States for about 20 years with overwhelmingly positive results and corroborating data.

Academic studies have been extant since the mid 90s – all showing comparable results – irrespective of the industry or country where BBS has been implemented. Management-driven safety has evolved into employee-driven safety, just like management-driven quality has evolved into employee-driven quality. BBS applications that fail have similar characteristics:

· Leadership is not engaged (which means values, systems and processes have not changed)

· The Steering Committee is not functioning properly

· The data is not being used effectively

· Employees are not engaged

A great many home-grown efforts have problems; it seems like a good idea. Hey! This ain’t rocket science; we can do this ourselves and save lots of money. It sounds good up until the point where someone has to tell senior leadership that they are not doing their job. Or, when internal personalities and politics prohibit objective analysis; changes aren’t made and you cannot say the wrong thing or you may get a poor performance evaluation.

When you tell companies they need an objective, third-party change agent (consultant), they think you are making a self-serving statement. Many companies have had bad experiences with consultants and they think they are all suspect. Helpful hint: Use consulting companies where the consultants have advanced degrees; the more Ph.D.s the better. Why? Because Ph.D. Behavioral Psychologists have a commitment to achieving success irrespective of the money involved.

I know a lot of Ph.D. behavioral psychologists, and they are universally committed to achieving change in an ethical manner. They are not driven to just sell products and make money. Behavior change is their life – their career – their personal commitment. Their personal identity is defined by the quality of their work.

If you have a great BBS process, but your employees are not engaged, it may be because the consequences for participating or not participating are not significant. BBS distinguishes itself from pseudo-BBS processes (like the old STOP process) by being focused on identifying and acknowledging safe behavior as well as concerns. Positive feedback, rewards, recognition, and group celebrations differentiate BBS from other approaches.

In the United States, hierarchical organizational structures have been all but abandoned in favor of flatter – more participative structures that encourage employee participation in decision-making processes. An accompanying phenomenon has been an equivalent social sensitivity – an increased emphasis on employee respect, job satisfaction, and management-employee relations.

Progressive companies (those that seek to elicit high levels of discretionary effort from their workforce) develop managers and supervisors who know how to provide positive feedback and recognize employee value-added behaviors. They embrace the concept of “Total Rewards,” which attempts to align all organizational systems and processes in a manner that encourages employee loyalty, commitment, and performance contribution.

Internationally, there are broad variances in organizational practices and social systems. Many companies have not trained their supervisors and managers in advanced interpersonal skills and the relationship between employee and supervisor is authoritatively defined. Therefore employees may not be positively encouraged to perform, but perform in order to avoid the displeasure of their immediate supervisors. The difference in performance and job satisfaction between the two approaches is well researched and documented. Well trained supervisors who know how to use positive feedback and recognition attain 30%+ better employee performance when compared to authoritarian models of supervision.

There are many organizational settings in which tangible incentives are practical and can compensate for problems with supervisory training, organizational structure, or other broad cultural issues. In other words, if you cannot engage your employees with a Total Rewards or positive reinforcement-based organizational philosophy, then you can elicit employee performance and behavior change using well designed incentive systems.

Incentives have always worked well in jobs and industries where employees willingly compete against explicit performance measures and objectives. Most sales-related jobs have at least monthly measures of performance and sales people are willingly to pit themselves against each other and a sales goal. They love the awards, plaques, Ipods, and vacation trips they are awarded as a result of reaching performance objectives.

Incentives have less consistent success when applied to manufacturing settings, and their effectiveness is related to the sensitivity with which the rewards and recognition process is designed and applied. The systematic delivery of awards, tangible items, and so forth is effective when paired with management attention and organizational appreciation.

Incentives can be effective when:

• You need to create behavior change quickly
• When organizational culture change is impractical – where the government runs the business or the organization is engaged in broader problems (like the automotive industry in the US now)
• Where leadership engagement is difficult to obtain
• Where supervisor and managers are not well trained in “people skills”
• Where management has very little leverage over performance behavior – as in highly unionized organizations
• Where the education level of employees is very low or language barriers disrupt supervisor/employee communications
• Where money is the primary motivator for job satisfaction
• The organization cannot drive symbolic rewards and recognition practices successfully

The use of tangible rewards in conjunction with BBS processes is common in the US. Symbolic rewards – caps, coffee cups, gift certificates, and dinner celebrations employees are quite common. If an employee in the US feels rewarded by a gift certificate and a plaque, but is conflicted by larger rewards like Ipods and vacation trips, then the organization should govern its behavior accordingly.

On the other hand, many work environments require the systematic delivery of tangible rewards to fully engage employees and to encourage behavior change. If the system is customized to the organization and to the specific behaviors required for performance success, then incentives will add value. If you read previous blogs in this sequence, you will identify a trend in the advice I provide for interjecting change into organizations: Participation, collaboration and customization are necessary to ensure that the system fits the organization and to ensure that employees accept the system.

If your BBS system is not performing satisfactorily, then you might consider increasing employee engagement and behavior change through the skillful and sensitive application of a well-designed tangible reward system. Make sure that the tangible rewards are applied to up-stream performance indicators and to safe behaviors – not to downstream results.

Also, consider using incentives to encourage management and supervisory behavior change. If you survey your employees about what kind of verbal behavior they want to see from their supervisors, you will come up with a list that approximates the multitude of surveys conducted in the US and Europe asking the same question.

Reviving a Struggling Behavior-Based Safety Process: Use Observational Capability to Improve Quality and Productivity

Sooner or later you hit the wall; your process becomes routine…your observers are going through the motions…they may be pencil whipping out of boredom. Employees have lost interest; it is getting harder and harder to keep the steering committee interested in meeting.

Anyone who is involved in Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) for any length of time is going to go through this down cycle and hear other companies voice these same complaints. The answer is too simple to get much attention: Apply trained observer skills in other areas of organizational performance.

Your trained observers know how to identify specific behaviors – safe and unsafe. Why not apply that skill to other types of behaviors? What employee behaviors might decrease costs? What behaviors might improve efficiency – save time, redundancy, parallel efforts, improve communication, decrease waste, and improve a system or process?

BBS observers need to stick to safety, but what about the observers that have been trained and are not currently doing observations, or all the people who have rotated through their role as observers and are no longer doing safety observations?

Trained observers understand “behavioral root-cause analysis” (often referred to as the ABC Analysis). They know how to identify the factors that contribute to behavioral causation. You don’t have to have a Six Sigma Process or a Lean Manufacturing initiative in place to organize your trained observers to identify behaviors that either create waste or the behaviors themselves are a waste of time.

I’ve never had a job where I didn’t ask the question, “Why are they asking me to do this? It’s a waste of time.” I bet you’ve had the same experience. Not only do employees routinely identify job behaviors that waste time and money, but they usually have a suggestion about a behavior (or behaviors) that will work better – save time and money.

If your company has implemented BBS, you’ve already invested in training your employees to “observe what works and what does not.” If you are not using that investment to improve quality and productivity, you are leaving money on the table. All you have to do is ask employees to identify behaviors in their job that can be deleted or behaviors that need to be added to the job. The same goes for processes and procedures – let your behaviorally savvy employees help you find a more efficient way – a better behavior.

You don’t want to go “lean” on safety behavior. You want to make sure that employees have the time and take the time to be safe; you do want to eliminate (go lean) on behavior that wastes time and resources.

Gather a few of your trained observers – active and inactive. Explain this approach and ask them what they think is the best way to apply it. Maybe each observer could collect ideas from employees; maybe each employee is asked to “observe” their own jobs and identify behaviors they have always wanted to delete or add.

The idea of “doing it lean” is pretty appropriate for the economic times. Employees who are bored with “just doing safety observations,” may find it interesting and novel to use their skills to eliminate waste – to reduce costs to the company and insure people keep their jobs.

Safe behavior, quality related behavior, productivity related behavior, efficient behavior, time-saving behavior – it’s all behavior – what people do on the job. Why not turn behavior-based safety into behavior-based quality, and behavior-based productivity. Not doing more; doing it differently or not doing something that doesn’t work well.

Using BBS Observation Skills for Emergency Preparedness

If you are implementing behavior-based safety correctly, you have taught your observers what a behavior “is,” or “is not” – meaning they know a behavior from a non-behavior. A behavior can be observed; a non-behavior, like “thoughtfulness,” (the word implies a state of mind, not directly observable behavior) cannot be directly observed. We can only observe behaviors (something someone says or does); we use the word “thoughtful” when we later summarize all the specific behaviors for someone else.

So when I say Bob is really “thoughtful,” I am usually summarizing my individual behavioral observations, perhaps over time and in different circumstances, rather than say, “I saw Bob open the door for a female coworker, send his wife flowers on their anniversary, phone a sick coworker, help a kitten out of a tree, and visit his neighbor in the hospital.”

Your observers should (if you are allowing them to evolve their skills and rewarding them for new ideas – new approaches) be developing good “observational skills” – like Sherlock Holmes, they should be picking up on increasingly fine-grained discriminations about what they see others doing at work. And hopefully, they know the difference between a state of mind (something they can’t see) and a physical behavior (something someone says or does that can be directly observed and counted.)

“Performing observations” increases an employee’s self-awareness about their own job behavior; they become more vigilant and often rehearse their movements self-consciously in accord with observational checklists. They anticipate possible contingencies – variations that might create risk or lead to an incident.

“Being observed” has a similar effect. Although knowing that you are being observed may create a level of self-consciousness, that is not a bad thing. Self-consciousness is a heightened state of awareness – a more intense state of mental focus. Physical and mental practice are important components of building or rebuilding work habits – of creating new neurological pathways – often referred to as “habits.”

Any company implementing BBS – observing people at work for all the reasons stated above – should also use the observational process to develop emergency response practices and behaviors to a level that equips employees to react automatically to prescribed situations. Most jobs functions have either “high-risk” tasks, or high-risk situations – many of which have been identified because of past accidents or near-misses.

Even if there is not precedent, a brain-storming session about almost any job allows us to identify potential circumstances where we will need to react quickly and automatically to the situation. In most cases, when emergencies happen – because they are usually rare events – no one is prepared and chaos prevails.

The media is rich with examples of crisis situations where unprepared employees panicked and the consequences were dire. Each of us has an emergency brake in our car; if your brakes fail coming up to a stop light, will you have the presence of mind to quickly reach down and pull (or push with your foot, an even more demanding emergency response) the emergency brake?

If you are honest, you know full well that you would probably panic and keep stabbing the foot brake harder and faster. The only way you can be prepared for that specific emergency is to get in an empty shopping mall parking lot and practice quickly coming to a stop using the emergency brake. Even better, if someone in the car cues the stopping crisis by yelling “stop!” or “tricycle!”

Trained BBS observers can work with employees to help prepare them for the most likely job-specific, hazardous, at-risk situations. Observers can take 5 to 10 minutes to watch one or more employees practice their response behaviors in high-risk situations where the employee will not likely “pull up the handbrake.”

The idea of practicing to handle emergency situations is not new. The notion of using BBS observers to provide employees with feedback while they practice “what-if,” scenarios for job specific situations is new – to me. If you have been using your BBS trained observers (which should include every employee, but that’s another discussion) to strengthen emergency, crisis, high-risk, and unanticipated circumstances, then I apologize and please send me an email and tell me about your experiences.

Your employees may not have to land an Airbus 320 on the Hudson River, but I’ll bet you can think of some situations where an employee or a coworker may need to perform a proportionately dramatic response. Your coworker falls from the scaffold and is hanging by his safety belt. You are the only one around; what do you do?

There are a thousand similar possibilities, but like at-risk behaviors, there are some more probable than others. If we don’t practice our responses in these likely circumstances, we are unlikely to react decisively and effectively. This is just one more potential opportunity to profit from the observation process and build increased interest in the observer role.