Safety Culture Excellence

Hello everyone! It is with great pleasure that I announce that we will be hosting a one day event titled “Advanced Lean Behavior-Based Safety Facilitator Seminar”.

Based on several conversations with our clients and previous conference attendees, we have modified our typical annual conference.  Therefore, instead of our usual large gathering, we will hold several small, yet more advanced one-day seminars throughout the year.  The first of these events will be the “Advanced Lean Behavior-Based Safety Facilitator” seminar, scheduled for the 30^th of April 2009. 

The other seminar topics for this year are the following:

• Leadership Safety Coaching - Teaching Leaders How to be Safety Coaches
• Assessing & Developing Your Safety Culture

The Advanced Lean Behavior-Based Safety Facilitator seminar will be held on Thursday the 30^th of April 2009 at the Sheraton North Houston Hotel which is located at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental airport. We are limiting the audience size to 50 for this event so we can keep in focused and ensure we can move through the advanced topics at a fast pace. The investment per attendee is $795.

The Seminar will have the following Agenda:

• Assessing Readiness for Improvement
• Existing processes - Critical Questions and Easy to Spot Waste
• How to Ensure Success and Continuous Trust with Labor Unions
• Ensuring Leadership Support
• Practical Application in Logistically Challenging Environments
• How to Avoid Start-Up Failure and Achieve Sustainable Success
• Observer Burn-Out and Motivation
• The Importance of Communication in a Behavior-Based Safety Process
• How to Facilitate Success When Leading Steering Committees
• Continuous Improvement & Maintaining a Results Orientation
• Using Behavior-Based Safety to Improve the Safety Culture

I will be facilitating this event along with Terry Mathis, the CEO and Founder of ProAct Safety and the world’s most experienced practitioner of Behavior-Based Safety. If you are unfamiliar with Lean Behavior-Based Safety, Lean BBS^® is based on the philosophy of achieving faster accident reductions with the minimum internal resources and external cost requirements, ultimately achieving a more sustainable internalized continuous improvement process.  Borrowing proven techniques from Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and experiences from over 1000 successful global implementations; Lean Behavior-Based Safety has proven to be the most efficient and practical approach to an already effective theoretical process.

We are proud of the fact that ProAct Safety  is the only firm who has been called in behind all of the major Behavior-Based Safety methodologies. Unfortunately we have found when auditing existing processes, (if they were initially successful) it is common to see many traditional Behavior-Based Safety processes plateau in their results after the first few years of operation.  At this point the process can become routine and the process leaders may go into a holding pattern that loses the original result-based orientation.  The newness and successes that motivated the process early on disappear into the past and the whole process tends to simply go through the motions and slowly lose momentum.  Behavior-Based Safety processes do not typically fade away if they have ever been successful, but they become much less than they are capable of being. This is the perfect time for Behavior-Based Safety process improvement.This intensive session will enable the participants to create a customized plan, using the latest Lean Behavior-Based Safety (Lean BBS^®) Technologies for spearheading process improvement. Utilizing the best of your existing Behavior-Based Safety process, your site Behavior-Based Safety leaders will explore the options and learn the lean techniques that will successfully breathe new life and efficiency into the existing structure. 

• Attain the next step-change in accident reduction results through better targeting
• Increase employee participation through a narrowed focus
• Increase the level of expertise in the personnel active in the process
• Provide new techniques to the observation and data analysis strategies
• Re-energize the process through improved results and more efficient functions
• Reduce worker requirements to maintain the process
• Assess the existing Behavior-Based Safety process for positive foundations to build on
• Make more efficient use of site leaders and steering teams
• Narrow the focus of the checklist to improve efficiency
• Learn the benefits of making observations shorter but more effective
• Target observations where they will produce the best results
• Simplify observation data to make it easier to analyze
• Produce faster, more targeted results
• Truly accomplish the reality of continuous improvement in safety
• Learn tools and methods to address the site-specific variables, thus ensuring internalization and success 

This will be a fast paced event which again is why we are limiting this to 50 people. If you would like to register for the event please visit www.proactsafety.com for more information. I look forward to seeing you there!

Shawn Galloway

President & Chief Operating Officer – ProAct Safety, Inc

Founder, Host & Coauthor – Safety Culture Excellence

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Greetings from Barnsley, England located in South Yorkshire. Last week I received a comment and two thought provoking questions from a subscriber. They were as follows:

“What are your thoughts on fixing targets on near miss reporting / investigation, as a part of measuring safety performance?

Other question, How deep should the near miss incident investigation go?. Should it be as much as a first aid incident investigation. Thanks”

Thank you for this and the positive feedback! Here are my quick thoughts. I encourage others to “weigh in” as they see fit. To respond to your questions, I would like to first provide some background information.

I’m a believer that history tends to repeat itself and if you aren’t learning from the past, you are as often said “doomed to repeat it”. – Moreover I believe that safety can seem like a numbers game when you look at the severity ratio aspect of accidents/incidents. I am of the school of thought (like Dean Gano) that most accidents have both behavioral/precautionary and conditional prevention opportunities. There are low probability risks that occur daily in the normal work that people do. If a task has a 1 in 1000 chance of resulting in an incident/accident and if several people perform the task 3 times a day for a few years, eventually someone’s luck will run out.

For all of the risks that take place, a percentage of them become near-misses/close-calls/near-hits a smaller percentage turn into first aids and even fewer turn into recordable/reportable types. If you haven’t, I encourage you to listen to the previously recorded podcast titled: The Cliff Analogy.

Consider that some people who are working at the edge will come close to falling and catch themselves (near-miss) some fall off but just receive a bump or minor scratch at the bottom (first aid) and fewer will fall and receive a more serious injury (recordable). Now not everyone who walks out to the edge of a cliff will fall off. However everyone who falls off walked out to the edge. This is what is referred to as a risk pool. Near-miss reporting offers an opportunity to identify the risk pools prior to someone getting seriously hurt. (“Wow someone was working at the edge and almost fell off? Well what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen again or prevent someone from actually falling off?)

It is important to report this type of information because one can not predict severity in accidents. I have been at sites where a person had fallen off two steps and it resulted in a fatality. I have been at another site where someone fell two stories and only broke a bone. I knew a man that slipped on a magazine that was on his carpet at home and he hit his head. Unfortunately he lost his life. I’m sure there are several of you (admittedly like myself) that have also slipped on something at home and got away injury free. As I’m writing this, one of our associates came in my office to tell me about an accident she saw on the way to the office. She said “had I been 150 feet further up the road I would have been hit by the driver” Sometimes the difference between a near-miss and a serious incident is 150 feet; many times it is just inches.

I do believe that there will always be an element of risk in many things people will do. While I believe zero accidents is a possibility (as I’ve seen it first hand in some very dangerous environments), zero risk isn’t possible. It is impossible to completely engineer out all of the risks so we must continue to work to identify those hidden risks and develop other ways to minimize the exposure. This is why we have to change the definition of “Safe” from no accidents to meaning “not at risk”. The better we can identify those areas without someone getting hurt to tell us, the better off we are. This also creates the necessity to help people understand the precautions they can take when exposed to the different risks in their environment.

As a site gets better and better in safety before the accidents go completely away and you sustain zero accidents the incident data does a nasty thing to you, it loses it statistical significance. It no longer provides trends to respond to, only random data points. This of course is why many sites hit a plateau and experience slight ups and downs over a few years. Moreover this is what has lead to the global popularity of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS). Rather than just relying on “reporting” to understand safety challenges, this process (if done correctly) looks at common practice to better see the hidden dangers and possibility of taking very specific precautions to minimize the exposure to the inevitable risks.

Prior to creating performance targets for reporting near-misses and deeply trying to investigate the almost events; I would first encourage an organization to, as Covey would say, ”Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” It is important to understand what perceptions exist in the organization. Perception surveys can provide you part of this answer. So can simply talking with the population during your normal conversations.

• First understand how people define a Near-miss. I have asked this same question to thousands of employees and have received many different incorrect responses. If you expect a person to report something that falls into a certain category, ensure the expectations are clear. Don’t let incorrect perceptions determine your success.
• Second, I encourage you to understand how population views the context of measurement. Far too often measurement is looked at as a fault finding/blame placing tool, rather than to help understand and improve. A great book for this is called “Transforming Performance Measurement”. A link can be found at:
• http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com/recommended-reading/
• Third I encourage you to look at how people view the current effectiveness of first aid and recordable reporting. If people report something and nothing happens or there is no follow up or communication back… If the system is viewed as a black hole safety system, it will be difficult to get people to report additional things. Unfortunately ineffective employee suggestion systems will have an impact on incident reporting as well. Resulting in both being lumped into the commonly heard perception “why keep telling them about the issues, when nothing is happening to fix them.”  
• Fourth, look at what might demotivate people first and work to remove those demotivators before adding the motivators. The belief is that the motivation is already there, just remove the barriers! Rather than finding ways to motivate reporting, first understand what the barriers to reporting are. As I learned from the teachings of Ferdinand Fournies, people are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing, however barriers exist that end up demotivating the performance. Try to identify what might demovitate someone to report and neutralize those aspects within the culture. Consider that there are three elements of motivation: Reducing de-motivators, adding motivators and rewarding. In looking for the general demotivators, look for: Constant change, withholding information, hypocrisy, dishonesty, unfairness, unproductive activities, internal competition, lack of follow-up, over-control, ignoring input. Conversely for motivators continue providing input, a sense of ownership in safety (programs, processes), involvement, teamwork, a scorekeeping mentality (achieving success not avoiding failure – TRIR), improvement, winning, variety and of course recognition. Lastly, if you want the near-miss reporting to continue, create a positive consequence for the activity.
• Fifth, work to continuously communicate the reason for reporting Near-misses and build in real life examples from both at work and home. Consider how powerful it can be when people understand that they can report an almost event and there would be new insight and a positive outcome. If there are trust issues, consider an anonymous system to build the trust and most importantly demonstrate how the tool will be used. Recognize you might be sacrificing the ability to perform a deep analysis when it is anonymous; sometimes this is worth it in the beginning to build trust in the tool. As a side effect consider that this will help strength the safety culture. Consider communicating examples of how a hidden issue was found and solved, without someone having to get hurt, or in trouble.

I believe having a goal for near-miss reporting can be a great idea, because an organization should measure more than just “did we have fewer accidents this year than last?” We have helped many organizations develop their own custom Balanced Scorecards for Safety (Leading & Lagging, Impacting & Interactive Safety Metrics) and near-miss reporting is a common indicator.

The danger lies in focusing too much on the requested number and not enough emphasis on the rationale and necessity; thus creating a fiction writing contest. Deming once said “the numbers are critical but relatively unimportant”. In other words, the numbers are critical but not the end goal.

Several organizations perform a full root cause analysis on a near-miss to identify the contributing factors and precautionary control points. I always encourage investigators to look beyond employee behavior/actions, if this is found as a “root cause” or contributing factor. Many people will stop there because they can not answer the next “Why Question”. If one person is or feels encouraged to take a risk, usually others are as well. It is important to always look at the cultural aspects during an investigation/analysis. I believe that when the culture supports the measurement and understands why we need to investigate near-misses, an in-depth analysis can be a very positive thing. Consider that if people are fearful of the method and outcomes of first aid or recordable investigations, near-misses reporting will be negatively impacted. If you do not address the perceptions and cultural aspects of performance measurement, you will have little data to analyze; making this post unfortunately, a moot point.

Thank you again for the topic idea, keep them coming!

Shawn Galloway

President & Chief Operating Officer

ProAct Safety

Founder & Coauthor

Safety Culture Excellence

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Greetings from The Woodlands, Texas. We have had several requests asking us to provide our thoughts on this week’s topic. It is sometimes difficult to provide a blanket answer to questions such as this. I have seen in practice this strategy work very well and conversely I have seen it very quickly destroy a culture and undo years of hard work. Every site is unique. I believe you have to ask yourself “what am I trying to accomplish?” Most people have good intentions when asking injured employees to help out with safety tasks, whether it is administrative in nature, training or simply communicating lessons learned. Most often where the danger lies is when the injured party or anyone else for that matter, feels that participation is forced. What typically follows is a belief that this is a punishment for getting hurt. When a culture believes that punishment will follow injury, well I think we will all agree that it doesn’t take much to suppress reporting; or worse drive it completely underground. That is not the path to zero we are looking for…

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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I received a comment and some great thought provoking questions from Karthik.

Thank you for this and the positive feedback! Here are my quick thoughts. I encourage others to “weigh in” as they see fit. To respond to your questions, I would like to first provide some background information.

I’m a believer that history tends to repeat itself and if you aren’t learning from the past, you are as often said “doomed to repeat it”. – Moreover I believe that safety can seem like a numbers game when you look at the severity ratio aspect of accidents/incidents. I am of the school of thought (like Dean Gano) that most accidents have both behavioral/precautionary and conditional prevention opportunities. There are low probability risks that occur daily in the normal work that people do. If a task has a 1 in 1000 chance of resulting in an incident/accident and if several people perform the task 3 times a day for a few years, eventually someone’s luck will run out.

For all of the risks that take place, a percentage of them become near-misses/close-calls/near-hits a smaller percentage turn into first aids and even fewer turn into recordable/reportable types. If you haven’t, I encourage you to listen to the Cliff analogy podcast

(http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com/2008/04/06/the-cliff-analogy/):

Consider that some people who are working at the edge will come close to falling and catch themselves (near-miss) some fall off but just receive a bump or minor scratch at the bottom (first aid) and fewer will fall and receive a more serious injury (recordable). Now not everyone who walks out to the edge of a cliff will fall off. However everyone who falls off walked out to the edge. This is what is referred to as a risk pool. Near-miss reporting offers an opportunity to identify the risk pools prior to someone getting seriously hurt. (“Wow someone was working at the edge and almost fell off? Well what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen again or prevent someone from actually falling off?)

It is important to report this type of information because one can not predict severity in accidents. I have been at sites where a person had fallen off two steps and it resulted in a fatality. I have been at another site where someone fell two stories and only broke a bone. I knew a man that slipped on a magazine that was on his carpet at home and he hit his head. Unfortunately he lost his life. I’m sure there are several of you (admittedly like myself) that have also slipped on something at home and got away injury free. As I’m writing this, one of our associates came in my office to tell me about an accident she saw on the way to the office. She said “had I been 150 feet further up the road I would have been hit by the driver” Sometimes the difference between a near-miss and a serious incident is 150 feet; many times it is just inches.

I do believe that there will always be an element of risk in many things people will do. While I believe zero accidents is a possibility (as I’ve seen it first hand in some very dangerous environments), zero risk isn’t possible. It is impossible to completely engineer out all of the risks so we must continue to work to identify those hidden risks and develop other ways to minimize the exposure. This is why we have to change the definition of “Safe” from no accidents to meaning “not at risk”. The better we can identify those areas without someone getting hurt to tell us, the better off we are. This also creates the necessity to help people understand the precautions they can take when exposed to the different risks in their environment.

As a site gets better and better in safety before the accidents go completely away and you sustain zero accidents the incident data does a nasty thing to you, it loses it statistical significance. It no longer provides trends to respond to, only random data points. This of course is why many sites hit a plateau and experience slight ups and downs over a few years. Moreover this is what has lead to the global popularity of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS). Rather than just relying on “reporting” to understand safety challenges, this process (if done correctly) looks at common practice to better see the hidden dangers and possibility of taking very specific precautions to minimize the exposure to the inevitable risks.

Prior to creating performance targets for reporting near-misses and deeply trying to investigate the almost events; I would first encourage an organization to, as Covey would say, ”Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” It is important to understand what perceptions exist in the organization. Perception surveys (http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com/category/safety-perception-surveys/) can provide you part of this answer. So can simply talking with the population during your normal conversations.

• First understand how people define a Near-miss. I have asked this same question to thousands of employees and have received many different incorrect responses. If you expect a person to report something that falls into a certain category, ensure the expectations are clear. Don’t let incorrect perceptions determine your success.
• Second, I encourage you to understand how population views the context of measurement. Far too often measurement is looked at as a fault finding/blame placing tool, rather than to help understand and improve. A great book for this is called “Transforming Performance Measurement”. A link can be found at:
• http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com/recommended-reading/
• Third I encourage you to look at how people view the current effectiveness of first aid and recordable reporting. If people report something and nothing happens or there is no follow up or communication back… If the system is viewed as a black hole safety system, it will be difficult to get people to report additional things. Unfortunately ineffective employee suggestion systems will have an impact on incident reporting as well. Resulting in both being lumped into the commonly heard perception “why keep telling them about the issues if when nothing is happening to fix them.”  
• Fourth, look at what might demotivate people first and work to remove those demotivators before adding the motivators. The belief is that the motivation is already there, just remove the barriers! Rather than finding ways to motivate reporting, first understand what the barriers to reporting are. As I learned from the teachings of Ferdinand Fournies, people are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing, however barriers exist that end up demotivating the performance. Try to identify what might demovitate someone to report and neutralize those aspects within the culture. Consider that there are three elements of motivation: Reducing de-motivators, adding motivators and rewarding. In looking for the general demotivators, look for: Constant change, withholding information, hypocrisy, dishonesty, unfairness, unproductive activities, internal competition, lack of follow-up, over-control, ignoring input. Conversely for motivators continue providing input, a sense of ownership in safety (programs, processes), involvement, teamwork, a scorekeeping mentality (achieving success not avoiding failure – TRIR), improvement, winning, variety and of course recognition. Lastly, if you want the near-miss reporting to continue, create a positive consequence for the activity.
• Fifth, work to continuously communicate the reason for reporting Near-misses and build in real life examples both at work and home. Consider that if people understand that they can report an almost event and there would be new insight and a positive outcome. If there are trust issues, consider an anonymous system to build the trust and most importantly demonstrate how the tool will be used. Recognize you might be sacrificing the ability to perform a deep analysis when it is anonymous; sometimes this is worth it in the beginning to build trust in the tool. As a side effect consider that this will help strength the safety culture. Consider communicating examples of how a hidden issue was found and solved, without someone having to get hurt, or in trouble.

I believe having a goal for near-miss reporting can be a great idea, because an organization should measure more than just “did we have fewer accidents this year than last?” We have helped many organizations develop their own custom Balanced Scorecards for Safety (Leading & Lagging, Impacting & Interactive Safety Metrics) and near-miss reporting is a common indicator.

The danger lies in focusing too much on the requested number and not enough emphasis on the rationale and necessity; thus creating a fiction writing contest. Deming once said “the numbers are critical but relatively unimportant”. In other words, the numbers are critical but not the end goal.

Several organizations perform a full root cause analysis on a near-miss to identify the contributing factors and precautionary control points. I always encourage investigators to look beyond employee behavior/actions, if this is found as a “root cause” or contributing factor. Many people will stop there because they can not answer the next “Why Question”. If one person is or feels encouraged to take a risk, usually others are as well. It is important to always look at the cultural aspects during an investigation/analysis. I believe that when the culture supports the measurement and understands why we need to investigate near-misses, an in-depth analysis can be a very positive thing. Consider that if people are fearful of the method and outcomes of first aid or recordable investigations, near-misses reporting will be negatively impacted. If you do not address the perceptions and cultural aspects of performance measurement, you will have little data to analyze; making this post unfortunately, a moot point.

Thank you again for the topic idea, keep them coming!

Shawn Galloway

President & Chief Operating Officer

ProAct Safety

Founder & Coauthor

Safety Culture Excellence

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Hello everyone! The picture below highlights where everyone is listening from this month. I thank you for the time you spend with us each week! If you have any suggestions on how we can make these podcasts more valuable to you, please let us know!

Have a great week and many thanks!

Shawn Galloway - ProAct Safety

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Greetings from London, England. This week we will discuss the difference between a vision and a goal of zero in safety and the impact they both have on the organizational culture. Have you ever thought about how the culture may react when you set a target, or a reduction goal, or vision for the year and it is not zero? Are you possibly sending the message that some level of injury is okay? Occasionally when we first begin working with a client (even if the client has better than industry average performance) we sometimes find that they really don’t know what zero looks like. When this is the case, then unfortunately we also find that the vision of excellence is so obscure that it can’t be effectively articulated, which means it won’t cascade down or throughout the organization. Just like safety cultures, do you really know what safety culture excellence looks like, other than the absence of failure?

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from Helsinki, Finland. As we all try to improve the safety of our people and work sites, we are always looking for better data, systems and ways to measure and improve safety performance. Thankfully many sites have passed the point of placing blame and using fault finding data (which is an easy trap to fall into),  and are now focusing upstream to understand their culture and the influencers on organizational risk taking. Yet there still lies the question of what and how to measure? Moreover what if you have no accident data, perhaps you are a new site, or you are multiple years with no accidents. Are you safe or sometimes lucky?

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Listen Now:

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