Taking stock of behavioral safety – Here´s how you can measure your Process

Grainne A. Matthews, Ph.D. and
Terry E. McSween, Ph.D.

Most quality improvement efforts such as Statistical Process Control, Total Quality Management, etc., stress that organizational improvement efforts must include an objective assessment of our process, often using the acronym PDCA for plan, do, check, act. We are encouraged to monitor the process and to use the information we gather to further refine our efforts. Behavioral safety is no exception. In fact, one of the defining features of behavioral safety is that decisions are based on data. Objective information is the basis for action. Another core characteristic is the involvement of employee teams who meet regularly to review the data and to make recommendations for adjustments and improvements.

Just what information should these employee safety teams be looking for? And what should they be monitoring? The chart at the right briefly summarizes a few of the most essential characteristics of most behavioral safety processes and the information that can be gathered to measure progress towards these.

Since two of the most important features of behavioral safety are employee observations and participation, clearly we should attend to these two dimensions of the process. Selecting these measures is relatively easy: how often are observations occurring (frequency of observations) and how many employees are doing observations (percentage of personnel conducting observations). Critical aspects of observations also include their quality, quantity, and accuracy. Each of these has measures that are readily available for review by Site Safety Teams and the Behavioral Safety Steering Committee.

One of the reasons that the quality of the observations is so important is that they will guide action planned by Site Teams and the Steering Committee to address trends in safe and at-risk practices and other safety concerns. So these teams will want to monitor their own success in addressing these patterns. This can be done by examining the number of action plans generated and the percentage completed.

The challenge of behavioral safety is the maintenance of process integrity beyond the initial implementation. Attention to the level and quality of involvement will do much to ensure that your behavioral safety process will continue to generate improvements in accident and injury rates.

Behavioral Safety Process Measures

*Typical measures, almost always used.

This article first appeared in Industrial Safety and Hygiene News (July 1998) and is reproduced here with permission.