‘feedback’ Articles

Creating a Culture of Safe Habits Begins with Identifying the Best Pinpoints: Hazard-driven Behavior Pinpointing in BBS

August 23rd, 2010

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42-17261190Guest post by Cloyd Hyten,
Senior Consultant, ADI

 

All of the talk lately has been focused on ‘what went wrong’ to create what turned out to be disastrous work environments in the case of BP’s Deepwater Horizon well explosion in the Gulf and the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in West Virginia. For the last several decades, many companies have turned to Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) systems to enhance their safety culture and reduce incidents and injuries.  When these systems are designed and functioning well, evidence shows that they are quite effective in improving safe habits, communication of safety concerns, and the resulting safety outcomes (see Turnbeaugh, T. 2010, March. Improving business outcomes: Behavior-based safety techniques can influence organizational performance. Professional Safety, 55(3), 41-49). But there are many factors that can reduce the effectiveness of BBS systems, and they can pop up early in implementation or many years into the process.  One of the key elements to an effective process is identifying sound behavior pinpoints.

BBS Systems are only as good as the behaviors targeted for improvement.  A common problem in BBS implementation occurs when participants select behaviors just because they are easy to observe (e.g., wearing safety glasses), or because they are easy choices in that failing to behave won’t draw management fire (e.g., keeping ladders properly stored).  This may mean that participants are avoiding the more serious behaviors – those that would help them be truly safer in their jobs – just to quickly generate behavior pinpoints to start working on.  Such practices might be acceptable in the first round of behavior pinpointing as a step in learning to observe fellow workers and give feedback to them, but if participants don’t quickly move on to more serious behaviors the entire process is at risk of being trivialized.

Hazard-driven pinpointing:  To pick behaviors worthy of everyone’s time and effort, the pinpointing process must start with the hazards present in the job.  Safety professionals together with workers from each functional area need to identify the most serious risks to personal safety or to process safety.  Many companies already do some form of Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) which identifies hazards and control measures that can be taken to eliminate or mitigate those risks.  Recent and thorough JHAs can supply the hazard lists for each job.  In the absence of a JHA, incident and near-miss data can reveal at least some of the more likely risks.  Of course, incident data tells you what has happened, not what might happen, and typical incident records tend to skew toward the more common but less severe injuries (e.g., strains and sprains).  Examining only incident data won’t reveal the less likely but potentially catastrophic risks (e.g. fires, explosions, leaks of harmful chemicals).

Hazard controls:  Once a list of hazards has been identified, participants need to examine existing control strategies.  If the hazard can be eliminated entirely through job or equipment redesign, and it is practical to do so, this should be the first choice.  If the hazard cannot be eliminated, other controls must be in place such as warning systems, interlocks, permitting procedures, equipment guards, special tools, personal protective equipment (PPE), safe job procedures, etc. It is crucial to realize that each of these controls relies on the behavior of operators and/or maintenance people to function properly and reduce the risk of an incident.  Therefore, the final safety control strategy must include personal protective behavior (PPB) as a component. 

PPBs:   To maximize safety, workers will need to do things; things like, but not limited to:

  • Heed warning systems
  • Use proper tools properly
  • Follow safe procedures without taking risky shortcuts
  • Wear PPE
  • Ask for help when lifting heavy or awkward objects
  • Do safety scans before starting the job
  • Repair equipment critical to safety in a timely manner

BBS participants should select serious hazards to address and the critical behaviors necessary to make safety controls effective and reduce the risk of injury or incident.  Identifying hazards first can prevent falling into the trap of picking behaviors that won’t truly improve safety.  Hazard-driven pinpointing will take more time than simply asking, “Anybody have ideas for our next behavior?” but the payoff will come in a more robust BBS process that can lead to meaningful improvements in safety.

Behavior Based Safety, feedback

Fostering Creativity in the Workplace

August 9th, 2010

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creativityI read an article recently (ABC News) that reported on what the magical number of emails a person can “stand” a day before they feel overloaded: 50 emails! That is not the number they receive, only the number before they feel stressed. With an estimated 1.6 billion people globally using email, I have to ask, “What effect do all these emails have on productivity and performance, or more critical to a company’s bottom line, on creativity?”   While we certainly could not conduct business without email today, the promise of increased efficiency and creativity is in many cases unrealized.  While most emails seem distracting to organizational objectives, the opportunity to increase creativity is large.

Let me first clear up the myth that creativity is something that some people have and others do not; while most people think that some people are more genetically predisposed to creativity than others are, creativity is behavior, and as such it can be increased or decreased like any other behavior.  Email has tremendous potential to increase creativity but unless managers understand the science of behavior it can be more of a punisher than a reinforcer of creativity.

Here are a few tips for how you might approach creativity in an email dominated world.

  • Reinforce all ideas: Any behavior that indicates a person is thinking about how to do a job better or how to find a new or improved product or service should be reinforced. An idea that  seems trivial or outrageous may be the father to one that generates a more efficient process, product or service.  Email gives a manager many opportunities to increase behavior aimed at leading an organization and “thinking outside the box.”
  • Remove obstacles that are punishing or penalizing creativity: It has been proven that the shorter the time between the submission of an idea and the acknowledgement of the submission, the more willing employees will be to offer up suggestions or share their ideas. By responding quickly, you reinforce their efforts to think creatively.  Equally important is that the process for doing so not be cumbersome. The easier you make it to get an idea into the system, the higher the number of suggestion you will get.  Email automatically documents suggestions for improvement and speeds action; both increase participation in idea generation.
  • Form unlikely teams: Step away from traditional work groups and engage your employees to work with employees outside the usual distribution lists. By forming diverse teams, you will increase the opportunities and discover new ways to solve problems.  Changing teams with email is as simple as changing the distribution list.
  • Train performers to fluency: When employees are fluent (automatic, non-hesitant responding) in their jobs, they have more cognitive time to consider alternative ways to accomplish job objectives.  Most organizations train employees in such a way that fluency is not attained until they have been on the job for months or even years. Computer technology can produce fluency in days or weeks.
  • Look to unlikely people:  Robert Epstein, a prominent creativity researcher, says, “All behavior is equally creative.”  I agree.  We never do the same thing in exactly the same way twice – creating potentially creative variance.   This means that everyone has tremendous creative potential when properly managed.  When organizations think that only certain people have creative ability, most of the potential for change is lost and involvement is diminished considerably.    

In the final analysis, when creativity is understood as behavior that all can exhibit, it can be increased many times its current rates.  Modern technology, including email, increases that ability.

Additional Resources:
Bringing Out the Best in People, Aubrey C. Daniels, Ph.D.
“Generativity Theory“, Robert Epstein, Ph.D., (chapter from) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Pritzker & Runco, Academic Press (1999).

Creativity, Positive Reinforcement, feedback

Ask Aubrey: Unions and Performance Feedback

March 25th, 2010

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GraphPaperQ:

I was recently promoted to a supervisory position at a federal agency where it is against the Collective Bargaining Agreement to discuss “performance standards” or “numbers” with employees. Everyone talks about how to improve performance in poetic terms that have little tangible meaning. I’ve read a couple of your books, but I would be run out of town if I ever showed an employee a chart of their performance. Do you have any tips for how I can get people re-focused without talking about numbers?

A: 

First let me say that I think the union has included a self-defeating provision in their bargaining agreement. The impact that performance feedback can have on not only performance but job satisfaction has been documented for over two decades. While I understand why this is an issue for the union, it is not in their long-term best interest.

Unfortunately, in the past untrained supervisors and managers have used performance feedback, i.e. charts and graphs, to punish rather than to recognize improved performance, or as a tool to help employees perform better. Of course people complained about the punishment and the union took up the cause.

In today’s economic environment, any union that does not actively work to help the organization perform better will eventually be replaced because business and government must improve. With private-sector unions, we have not had problems even with individual performance charts, primarily because they were used to recognize good or improved performance.

That said, you probably can’t do anything about that immediately.

I would suggest that you focus on recognizing on-task behavior when you see it, hopefully many times a day. While that is not as effective as including some performance tracking mechanism, it will improve results. If you can, I would also advise you to celebrate improved results where you give employees involved, an opportunity to tell you what they did to accomplish them. Encourage the team to share things that they saw others do that contributed to the improvement. This builds teamwork while improving performance. This kind of celebration does not expose individual performance but allows employees to voluntarily contribute. The effects of this kind of meeting can be dramatic on performance and morale.

Hope this was helpful,
Aubrey

Additional Resources:

Ask Aubrey, Consequences, feedback