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

Feedback and involvement procedures (Part 2)

Terry E. McSween

As part of the data review process in safety meetings, employees should establish improvement targets for their area's “percent safe.” These improvement targets should be realistic ones based on the existing level of safety performance as indicated by the observations. The goal should be for some fixed time period, such as the nenext one to three months. The goal is best set for some fairly short period of time, not for the entire year, so that the team can make frequent corrections to the process and have regular opportunities to celebrate success. Once the target is agreed upon, the team should draw it on the safety graph with a colored marker so that everyone can tell where they stand relative to the target.

To ensure that the goals get set, the design team should ensure that responsibility for setting the improvement target is clearly assigned and communicated. Generally, the person responsible for leading the safety meetings should take responsibility for ensuring that each team sets a safety goal. In some cases, the area safety team or Steering Committee should set the safety goal. This procedure would be appropriate if the observation process combined several shifts or areas that each had separate safety meetings. While employee participation is consistent with current quality philosophy, current data does not show a significant advantage for employee participation in goal-setting versus goals assigned by management, though employees do like to participate in setting goals (Fellner, and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1985).

Establishing this improvement goal is important for several reasons. Progress towards an explicit goal provides a positive source of motivation and helps build pride in the area's safety efforts. In addition, goal-setting helps reduce competition by providing a noncompetitive standard of comparison. An effective goal or performance target gives the team a standard for evaluating their performance. Members can compare their performance with their own goal rather than where they are relative to other groups. Downplaying competition is particularly important because different areas may have such different risks and safety requirements. Leading a team towards a common goal is a much better team process.

Once you have your observation process up and running, you will usually need to expand employee involvement. If you have initially established the observation process as a management or design team responsibility, you should begin to allow employees to participate after three months or so. Their participation may begin through joint observations conducted alongside supervision or as additional or stand-in observations. Just make sure that you provide an adequate training and orientation process for new observers, as described in the previous section.

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