IN THIS ISSUE

• News and Events
• Safety Champions at Devon Energy
• QSE Offers New Safety Culture Survey
• Positive Feedback, by Dave DeJohn
• Positive Influence: the Power of Positive Leadership, by Jerry Pounds
• President's Column: A Recent Research Report, by Terry McSween

QSE's Products and Services

Safety Books and Software

Request a QSE Speaker
for Your Event

Contact Us
at (936) 588-1140, or toll free from within the U.S. at (877) 588-1140

The Safety Edge newsletter is a free service to those who have registered to receive quarterly issues.
If you no longer wish to receive this free service, please click here and your name will be removed.

News and Events

• We're already starting to gear up for the Behavioral Safety Now conference, and you should too. Put September 30 through October 2 on your calendar now so you don't miss it. According to the Conference Coordinator, Cookie McKee, "the last two conferences in Kansas City were great! And this one in Reno, Nevada is going to be even better. Reno's a good choice because there is such a strong emphasis on behavioral safety in the University of Nevada at Reno (UNR) Psychology department."

Safety Champs at Devon Energy

Mary Lee and Licia Lee are both Administrative Assistants at Devon Energy Gas Services in Bridgeport, Texas. Mary and Licia have both been integral in the development, continued maintenance, and improvement of the organization's Values-Based Safety Process™ (VBSP) called S.A.F.E. (Safe Actions For Employees). In 2004, with the guidance of Dr. Judy Stowe, Devon Energy first developed and launched S.A.F.E. in the Exploration and Production group in Bridgeport, a sister company to Gas Services. Following the success of the first implementation, Gas Services adapted the S.A.F.E process in 2005.

QSE Offers New Safety Culture Survey

The things leaders do and say creates your safety culture which in turn supports or discourages your safety improvement initiative. World class safety requires safety leadership. Without the right leadership support, sooner or later you hit a wall—progress slows down, maybe your safety data goes the wrong way.

QSE is pleased to announce the availability of our new Values-Based Safety Climate Survey™ (VBSCS) to all organizations interested in measuring the health of their safety management system. Although QSE has been conducting in-depth safety assessments for a number of years, our new safety culture survey adds a new safety leadership measurement component to that effort.

A major objective of the survey is to determine what needs to be done—the critical behaviors that will strengthen your safety leadership and create an injury-free work environment. A second objective is to determine how your safety system is viewed by your associates; how strong is your safety culture? Differences in how groups perceive safety efforts indicate a major disconnect and is information critical to resolving problems and getting on the right track.

QSE’s VBSCS provides leaders, managers, supervisors, professionals and frontline employees with clear, specific behavioral feedback, and more importantly, with a clear directives for future behavior—how to get better.

All surveys are conducted anonymously and summary reports are generally available within a few days of survey administration.

If you are interested in learning more about the QSE Safety Climate Surveys, please contact John Cole, VP of Safety Climate, 650-345-2580.

Giving Immediate Positive Feedback

by Dave DeJohn

In the last newsletter, we presented Part 1 of Giving Immediate Positive Feedback consisting of Positive Feedback and Immediate Feedback. In this issue, we present Part 2: Setting a Positive Tone in Feedback and Feedback Model.

Feedback is more effective if you make it personal. Setting a positive tone in your feedback is key to making that happen by using “I”, not “We”, Not Over-Doing it, Ensuring the Feedback Fits, and Speaking From the Heart.

Effective feedback is a two-way conversation. It would be easier to just tell workers what you have to say and move on. But after you get the hang of it, you'll find that they will be much more open to your feedback when you listen to what they have to say too. Here is a feedback framework to use as a tool in discussing about your observation. 1) Describe the behavior. 2) State the impact of the behavior you observed. 3) Pause and Listen!

Positive Influence: the Power of Positive Leadership

by Jerry Pounds

Jerry Pounds is Senior Vice President - International at Quality Safety Edge, and publishes a blog on positive leadership.

In his blog "New Positive Reinforcement Strategies", Jerry writes:

If you don’t have people skills, if you are a manager or supervisor who is perfectionistic, impatient, and thinks that employees should do what they are paid to do without any need for motivation or positive reinforcement, then you are among the 75% of managers who feel the same way. But, don’t feel that you are doomed to be at odds with all the management development initiatives and consultants that ask you to positively reinforce your employees for improvement, extra effort or outstanding achievement.

Recent research presents a different perspective on the best way to encourage employees to perform their best. It seems that supervisors and managers who talk to employees frequently about their work, who stop by during the day to check on “how things are going,” supervisors who make casual but specific comments about what they see the employee doing right or wrong, have better performing departments and work groups than managers who intermittently apply more dramatic positive reinforcers to employee behavior or results. This is good news for managers who do not want to change their personalities and who are uncomfortable with delivering verbal praise for employee work behavior...

President's Column, by Terry McSween, Ph.D. A Recent Research Report

A few months ago, I was surprised to hear that Chevron was moving away from behavior-based safety. I found this difficult to understand. With empirical studies supporting behavioral safety, why was the company abandoning this evidence-based practice? Then I came across an article in the Journal of SH&E Research describing a recent study done within Chevron that reported no significant relationship between the frequency of behavioral observations and safety incident rates (Agraz-Boenek, Groves, & Haight 2007). I thought perhaps this study would shed some light on Chevron’s recent decision.

After reading the study carefully, let me say first that the study does not invalidate behavior-based safety. In fact, while the article was clear and well written, I was surprised that the study found its way to publication as it displays several methodological problems that prevent any firm conclusions. That said, I think the study does shed some light on why Chevron appears to be abandoning BBS. The BASIC process (the name of the company’s in-house behavior-based safety process) described in this article had several significant problems when compared with BBS as more typically practiced. In short, in spite of my concerns about methodology, I think the authors have provided some fine suggestions on how to design an ineffective BBS process!

...

...today we find many companies implementing BBS based on what they have seen other companies doing or what they believe is important, based on their own history and experience. Some will be successful, but those of us in the safety field need to be careful not to let the others define behavior-based safety in terms of opinion rather than research based evidence. If you are going to do behavior-based safety, either take the time to really study the literature and gain an in-depth understanding, hire the expertise into your organization, or bring in outside support on a contract basis – even if just for a day to get input on the plans you developed internally! We are here to help.