While it may seem logical to think that frontline employees are responsible for creating a safe working environment, they are not the ones who have control over budgets or resources. In this latest vblog, Dr. Judy Agnew, co-author of Safe By Accident?, discusses who is in charge of ensuring a safe physical environment and why organizations typically fall short in doing so.
For more on the topic of workplace safety, visit our many safety related articles on www.pmezine.com.
When it comes to safety, organizations need more than just compliance; they need people to follow the rules all the time, even when no one is watching. In this short video segment, Dr. Judy Agnew discusses why relationships are important and what it takes to build a strong safety culture. This video also explains why discretionary effort and trust are key to ensuring employees engage in safe behaviors around the clock.
You can walk into any work environment where safety is a major concern and see the signs on the wall, signs like “Protective Gear Must be Worn At All Times.” But why is it, that often times, employees tend to dismiss these warnings and work unprotected?
Safety signage, policies, memos and, yes, even training are considered antecedents. They only prompt behavior. To effectively build a proactive and safe work environment, you must have effective consequences in place to drive consistently safe behavior.
In this latest video blog, Judy Agnew, co-author of Safe by Accident?, discusses the natural tendencies toward using antecedents to manage safe behavior and what managers should do differently to create a consistent and safe work environment.
It’s probably a fair statement to say that companies are interested in supporting a safe work environment in their organizations. But it is all too apparent through today’s news headlines that organizations gamble with safety, including Sky Express, a bus company that had a recent deadly crash in Virginia. While bus companies and other government regulated industries have legislation in place to protect the public, private organizations are on their own to ensure that their safety practices yield safety by design.
In this latest video blog, Judy Agnew, co-author of Safe by Accident?, discusses the misnomer of incident rate as a predominant indicator of a company’s safety level and why companies need to invest in the science of behavior in order to manage all aspects of safety.
Guest post by Don Nielsen
Spike TV’s show Coal provides a window into the practices of the Cobalt coal mine in McDowell County, West Virginia. The series clearly presents the pressure to bring the coal to the surface and produce enough revenue to stay in business while demonstrating the dangers of traditional coal mining in dark, wet, and cramped spaces with the ever present danger of cave-ins in the physical spaces of life underground. There are also very real dangers facing the coal miners themselves, such as the ongoing possibility of coal dust explosions and exposure to pneumoconiosis or black lung disease; realities for all those who enter the mine each day.
In my work with clients in mines, this show causes much discussion—much concern. Safety issues evident in the first few episodes raise questions about the real effort to keep each other safe. An operator moved equipment, crushing the power cable and nearly hitting a fellow miner. Miners I work with point out that the miners moving the equipment should have engaged in safe behaviors such as communicating with and making visual contact with everyone in the area to avoid potential line-of-fire dangers. In this same episode loose roof material was pulled down, using a pick hammer, nearly crushing two miners. If putting safety first is a concern, miners should pull down the loose roof material using a long bar in a process called “barring down.” Additional concerns noted from this episode were the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) including safety glasses, hearing protection, and respirators, which are typically standard in most mines. Supervisors in the Coal series say “Let’s work safe today” but there appears to be no focus on establishing and maintaining safe behaviors, in fact a dangerous disregard for all—even when it is clear that, as the TV camera captures, there are strong relationships and respect among the miners on the show.
Telling workers that he wants them to work safely today is likely a true expression of the mine supervisor’s feeling. He certainly does not want anyone hurt, he doesn’t want a lawsuit, he doesn’t want a work stoppage, or grieving families, and certainly not unwanted publicity. The owners of Cobalt Coal have personal friends, maybe even family working underground. I do not doubt for a moment that they truly care about the people as well as their company. They also care about production. We see a clear relationship between the amount of coal produced, the behavior that is required to produce the coal, and the likelihood that the company will remain profitable enough to stay open for another week. (This coal mine, in that respect, is different from large operations in which production quotas are established to maintain and increase large profit levels- not merely keep the doors open.) The words “let’s work safe today” though sincere, are just words; not tied to behaviors to ensure that safe acts occurred. Unless the miners practice safe procedures and are reinforced for using them, safe behavior (particularly if it is more difficult or slower than unsafe behavior) is unlikely to occur in the mine. Grabbing the closest tool to bring down loose –rock was the quickest and easiest, though not the safest, thing to do. And if the proper tool was not available, the safer thing to do was not available to the miner. Commitment to safety must be linked from the behaviors of the owner (providing procedures, tools, and reinforcement systems) to the supervisors to the individuals engaged in the work.
This reality show is most upsetting to my colleagues in the mines because it makes light of the very real acts of caring, the daily effort of miners everywhere to stay safe and keep their fellow miners safe as well. They still make production targets, but never at the expense of life and limb. As this reality show continues over the next few weeks, I hope to see some changes in their strategies and an increase in safe behaviors. If not, there is nothing to feel about this ‘reality show’ but extreme sadness about the carelessness shown for the human life at hand.
Image via TrinityDC.edu
It’s happened again! An air traffic controller deliberately made his bed and slept in it while 7 different aircraft were trying to safely land at a Tennessee airport. I think it’s safe to assume this controller is a fine person who means no ill will. So why would someone in such a critical role take such a risk?
While the FAA continues its investigation into this and other claims of sleeping air traffic controllers, those who understand behavior from a scientific perspective will tell you that the solution to this problem does not lie in adding another controller in the tower or in punishing the offender.
For a better understanding of what should be done to eliminate situations that lead to unsafe conditions, I invite you to view a new video interview where I discuss the topic of Eliminating the Rare Error.
Workplace Safety will not improve until OSHA learns the basics of behavior changeI couldn’t help but be amused about an article in the New York Times reporting the latest citation by Federal regulators for safety violations in the Broadway production of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark. OSHA “regulators” have been “citing” the play for over a year. Why they call them “regulators” I don’t know because their citations change no behavior, they regulate nothing. One thing they do is keep the play in the public eye, a plus for the production company. The total sum fined over the past year is $12,600, considerably small in terms of the value the play received in free publicity.
When will “regulators” learn that the citations don’t work? Massey Mine had 1300 citations, BP had 360, and the company involved in the egg recall also had a long history of citations over the years. OSHA keeps giving citations, but in many, many cases nothing changes. As the New York Time article points out, the Spider-man production was in violation last year and they are still in violation today.
Let me put it this way. The closest thing we have to a behavioral law, as gravity is a law of physics, is that behavior is a function of its consequences. Consequences change behavior not citations. Telling them they are unsafe, although meant to be a punisher, is apparently a reinforcer- the behavior continues. Although OSHA attempts to punish violators with citations and fines, they are not punishers since punishment stops behavior. If OSHA invested the small amount of time it would take regulators to become fluent and develop skills in behavior change, workplace safety, or in this case the safety of everyone associated with the production of Spiderman, would be significantly improved.
I believe that OSHA should focus on increasing safety compliance. (I’ll bet they think they do that now.) Only reinforcement increases behavior. If companies experience with OSHA was to help them improve safety while decreasing cost and improving the quality of their products and services, the agency would be inundated with requests for help. As it is, when OSHA regulators appear on site, employees don’t rush to show them items of concern, they hide them or try to steer regulators away from them.
There is a better way to improve safety. Punishment or attempts at punishment won’t. Because of that, OSHA’s efforts are of little help to Spider-man. Nevertheless, as they say in the business, citation or no citation, the show must go on.
Guest post by Don Nielsen
Two recent articles, one in USA Today and another in the Wall Street Journal are once again illustrating unfortunate examples of organizations (and industries) that are at risk for being safe by accident.
Oil giant BP reported in the Wall Street Journal that it is “ensuring that lessons learned from the Gulf disaster will lead to improvements in operations and contractor services in deep-water drilling.” The same article also describes the vigilance of one BP leader at Alaska’s North Slope who worked tirelessly to report and follow up on all safety concerns he saw and that were reported to him. He was a leader who gained the trust and commitment of the men and women who put their safety at risk each and every day. Unfortunately, after some time, BP showed him the exit, leaving safety to chance once again.
Changing the BP safety culture may be a daunting task if history repeats itself. With a new Chief Executive, BP will undoubtedly institute new safety programs, attempting to improve their safety culture. Companies often change their approach to safety, using new programs and practices designed to address safety metrics, only to have their culture of safety remain unchanged. These companies MUST understand that only approaches based in science, the science of behavior analysis, are effective in the long term.
The airline industry, on the other hand, reported that there were no US airline fatalities in 2010, continuing a trend toward safer skies. The USA Today article identified new rules and better training as part of the recent reduction in airline fatalities. The article goes on to report, “In the entire First World, fatal crashes are at the brink of extinction.” This assertion was based on no deaths in US airline accidents in the years 2007, 2008, and 2010. The last fatal accident occurred February 12, 2009 when 49 people onboard a Colgan Air Bombardier and one person on the ground were killed in Buffalo. Is this cause for celebration or concern? Incident rates alone will not guarantee a strong culture of safety in the airline industry or in any other industry or organization. We must be cautious of these and other examples and look more closely at how safe behavior is managed and supported in organizations to know if we are indeed safe by design.
Whistleblower. The word often carries with it the stigma of a tattle-tale from childhood. Few children liked those who tattled as they might eventually tell on them. Although there is often a negative carry-over effect from childhood to the whistle-blower, the whistleblower’s tale is much more serious in that some wrongdoing has occurred or that dangerous or unhealthy conditions have been allowed to exist, despite efforts to correct them.
The fact that there are whistlebolwers at all is a telltale sign that leadership is either corrupt or punishes those who call attention to operational irregularities and unsafe conditions. While many whistle-blowing incidents go unreported, there can be significant consequences associated with whether or not someone blows the whistle – many of which affect the safety of workers and/or the American public. Recent events include the Upper Big Branch mining accident in West Virginia, the BP Oil Spill, and, most recently, the GlaxoSmithKline product contamination settlement (which did in fact earn one whistleblower $750M). These events shouldn’t raise the question whether or not to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, they should force us to ask the real question, “Why don’t organizations create the kind of culture that doesn’t need whistleblowers?”
In our just released book, Safe by Accident? Take the Luck out of Safety – Leadership Practices that Build a Sustainable Safety Culture, Judy Agnew and I take a focused look at safety leadership and how to create an organization where all employees are empowered and positively reinforced for calling attention to variations in organizational practices and conditions that put employees and the organization at risk. Organizations that create workplaces where employees feel safe to report problems will find that they are safe by design – no whistleblowers necessary.
Does your relationship with your boss or your employees have any effect on how safe the environment is? My colleague, Judy Agnew, writes in her latest article “Why Relationships Matter in Safety” (PM eZine 10-10) that relationships in safety do have a direct effect on the type of safety culture that exists. Those that build effective relationships also earn discretionary effort from their employees and therefore improved performance. Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking that effective relationships mean always being nice. Accountability and constructive feedback are very important to the relationship and help to build a trusting and safe environment. Here are a few of the best practices she discusses for building effective relationships around safety:
