Paula Paterson, Lead Consultant at Behavioural Change Consultancy Optimus Seventh Generation, discusses how an understanding of learning and behavioural characteristics, can help prevent, and achieve, an injury free workplace.
Anyone working in QHSE who has children will understand my reference to the scene from Disney Pixar’s film, Monsters Inc. when a monster returns from his job, known as a scare, with a human sock attached to his back. He is immediately ambushed, shaved down and disinfected with enough force to be seen as a violation, resulting in the number of incident free days immediately being reset back to zero, with the monsters sounding a collective sigh of relief. A worryingly accurate observation of some working environments?
With a background in learning and development, I come from a world where successes are celebrated and challenges are viewed as opportunities. So you can imagine my inner joy when I am informed of days, or man hours lost time (LTI), that are injury free – a success to be celebrated and a real demonstration of the level of care that can be achieved.
But how do we create and achieve an incident free workplace?
According to Geller, Douglas and Wiegand’s paper, ‘What’s Your Safety IQ? Personality Traits and Person States Related to Injury Prevention’, an injury free workplace requires attention to three things: the environment, including tools, equipment and climate of work setting, the person, including attributes, beliefs, and personalities, and behaviour, including safe and at-risk work practices, as well as intervening on others.
The above factors are interactive, dynamic and complementary, suggesting that the latter will influence and impact on the former two. For example, the changes in the environment have indirect effects on peoples’ behaviours and attitudes, and behavioural change usually results in attitude change. At Optimus Seventh Generation we would also include decision making as an influence, as the quality of our decisions will be seen in our behaviours, and if we hold a position of leadership it will affect the behaviours of others.
Interestingly, Geller, Douglas and Wiegand use the word ‘attention’. If we were to define care according to the dictionary, one of the definitions would be; serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk.
But why do we care about an incident that hasn’t happened, to then use this as a measures of safety and choose to reward it?
I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t be celebrated as it should. But I am reminded of the monster and the consequences that happen to the person who breaks the running streak if we use the absence of incidents as a measure of safety success.
Referring back to Gellar, Douglas and Wiegand, they would suggest that using this methodology to evaluate safety performance, leaves the primary motivator as ‘failure avoidance’. They propose that this is in avoidance of injury, and with a constant failure to achieve this, there is an apathetic ‘failure acceptance’. Therefore, despite best efforts an incident free project is considered unachievable. However LTI free measures are a testament to this, proving the theory is not always correct.
The other idea I explored was how to avoid being the person responsible for resetting all of those valued LTI free days back to zero, like the monster in the movie. James Reason argues that ‘a safe culture could be equated to an informed culture’[i], in other words, to be informed we have to be educated. In our industry reporting the negative means potential incidents can be effectively avoided or managed.
So, what am I suggesting?
The way safety incidents are reported and measured may be creating a culture which impedes the individual’s desire to report potential detrimental outcomes, nobody wants to reset the LTI days back to zero.
A thinking we use at Optimus Seventh Generation is that safety isn’t the absence of incidents, but the presence of barriers. This is a proactive and positive response to safety, highlighted by the Safety Case and Control of Major Accident Hazard (COMAH) Regulations, and is demonstrated through our Control of Works by recognising and recording such barriers as preventative or mitigating control measures, in response to identified hazards and risk.
Gellar, Douglas and Wiegand agree by defining that people should be held accountable for achieving injury free projects meaning we can then recognise and reward these proactive measures, as well as rewarding the outcome. By doing this, we are acknowledging the good behaviours and decision making that are contributed, and from my learning and development world, this goes a long way toward encouraging a repetition of these behaviours.
What you now have is ‘success seekers’. If these good behaviours continue, are communicated, embedded and remain consistent, the culture of the organisation will be positively influenced and sustained.
I have no doubt that we would want a culture of ‘success seekers’ and a more proactive approach to safety and the management of barriers. Something to then consider is what we choose to pay attention to in terms of data and how we measure and report the success of safety and what we reward. It seems to me that the current methodology may not always be producing the desired outcome.
[i] Achieving a safe culture: theory and practice; James Reason, Department of Psychology, University of Manchester
Paula Paterson is lead consultant at Behavioural Change Consultancy Optimus Seventh Generation
Behavioural Safety is interesting concept for most companies as it allows poor management to construct a case against an individual, or group, to hide that managements underlying failures under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (HASAWA) 1974, section 2 (2) (c) to provide information, instruction, training and supervision as necessary. Having seen such attempted to deflect cases of underlying poor management causation and blame the victim/s I have little time for this very American approach of blame shifting.
I have been working with Behavioural Based Safety for a number of years now. Using this technique I have seen how employees actually embrace safety as they feel that through these observations, the feedback that is given on both the positive and at-risk behaviours and the barriers that are removed in the workplace as a positive step. Behavioural Safety is a proactive approach that also prevents accidents from happening by identifying the key at-risk behaviours and enables the business to concentrate their efforts on these key areas.