Measure Up! Promoting Improvement Through Behavioral Safety

Terry E. McSween

Most quality improvement efforts such as Statistical Process Control and Total Quality Management stress that organizational improvement efforts must include an objective assessment of the process, often using the acronym PDCA for plan, do, check, act. Most quality improvement efforts encourage us to monitor the process and to use the information we gather to further refine our efforts.

Behavioral safety places a similar emphasis on the use of data. 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 defining feature is the involvement of employee teams in managing the process through regularly reviewing data in order to develop action plans for continuous improvement.

Typically a Steering Committee that is made up predominately of employees is responsible for managing an organization's behavioral safety process. In our experience, Steering Committees that do not effectively use data as the basis for action plans often make one of two kinds of errors: (1) they get too focused on awards and recognition, or (2) they spend too much time brainstorming and addressing issues based on opinion rather than fact.

Steering Committees need to use data for two types of analysis and problem solving. They need to (1) identify and address practices that are creating the most exposure to injury and (2) monitor and improve how well the process is functioning. The accompanying tables briefly summarize some of the most common measures that are useful for these two types of problem solving (See Tables 1 and 2).

We refer as to the primary measures that the Steering Committee needs to address as Type One measures because they reflect the primary objective of the behavioral safety process, which is to improve the safety of employees. Action plans based on these measures target increases in safe work practices that reduce the exposure of employees. The action plans should address both behavioral issues and facility issues that may be contributing to practices causing concern.

Type Two measures secondary measures that reflect the health of the behavioral safety process, that is, these are process measures that allow the Steering Committee to assess how well the process is functioning. Since two of the most important features of behavioral safety are employee observations and participation, the Steering Committee should typically attend to both of these critical dimensions of the process. Selecting these measures is relatively easy: how often are the observations done (i.e., frequency of observations) and how many employees are doing observations as a percentage of the total personnel. Critical aspects of observations also include their quality, quantity and accuracy. Each of these includes measures that are readily available for review by the Behavioral Safety Steering Committee. The Steering Committee should also to monitor their own effectiveness by tracking the number of action plans generated and the percentage of action items completed.

Type One measures are most important. Many of the Type Two measures improve when employees see the organization using observation data (the Type One measures) to effectively address safety issues.

The challenge of behavioral safety is maintaining the integrity of the process beyond the initial implementation. By responding to safety concerns identified through observation data, along with monitoring the level and quality of involvement, the Steering Committee can ensure that the behavioral safety process is long lasting, and that it continues help minimize the risks of injury.

Table 1 – Type One measures that a Steering Committee uses to directly improve safety

* Typical measures, almost always appropriate.

Table 2 – Type Two measures that Steering Committees often use to improve the effectiveness of the behavioral safety process

* Typical measures, almost always appropriate.

From the symposium Behavioral Safety: The Next Step. Proceedings of American Society of Safety Engineers, Orlando, Florida, February, 2001.