Improving Your Safety
With a Behavioral Approach
(Reprinted from Hydrocarbon Processing)

Feedback and involvement procedures

Terry E. McSween

Your teams should arrange to post graphs showing the observation data in work areas and locations where employees are likely to see them. A good practice is to establish a bulletin board for safety in each area. You can then readily display observation forms, safety graphs and other safety-related information.

Graphs should be simple and easy to understand. Your team should consider the value of establishing two graphs for each area, one showing “percent safe” observation data and the other showing the percent of observations completed each week. Each safety team should have a separate graph for observation data from their area, meaning you may have several graphs on the same scoreboard depending on how you have designed the observation process. For example, you may want each shift to have a separate graph of weekly safety observations that occurred strictly on that shift.

Initially, depending on the sophistication of your work force, asking observers to update the graphs manually is preferable to generating them by a computer. Requiring the observers to record the data on charts ensures that they understand the data being presented on the graph. The feedback will also be available without the delay that often results from a computerized process.

However, entering the observation data into a database or spreadsheet does have some advantages, however. It allows you to easily generate summary reports for distribution, which is particularly important for tracking the percent of observations conducted in a large organization. Computers can also easily generate monthly or weekly reports on the percent of observations completed in each area for review in management meetings (as discussed in the following section).

To get the maximum benefit from the observation process, you must ensure that the organization makes use of the data. In other words, the data must be reviewed and employees must respond to it. The best way to ensure that people look at the observation data is to build it into existing meetings. Ideally, the graphs and observation sheets should both be reviewed as one of the first agenda items in weekly safety meetings.

Data on the percent of observations completed should be reviewed in management meetings. Management should focus on managing the safety process, not the results of the process. If management attempts to manage the results of the observation process, they will ruin the integrity of the system. Such pressure from management will eventually bias the observation process and destroy the value of the data.

This does not suggest that managers and supervisors should not continue to pay attention to safety on the job. The observation data is a measure of the extent to which employees work safely. Managers and supervisors must provide daily feedback to employees for on-the-job safety to ensure the success of the behavioral safety process. However, they should emphasize safety on the job and maintaining scheduled observations, not on the "percent safe" resulting from the observations.

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This article first appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing (August 1993) and is reproduced here with permission.