Our Spring 2011 newsletter highlighted Tucson Electric Power’s highly successful use of behavior-based safety. A principal subsidiary of UniSource Energy Corporation, TEP generates power for over 400,000 customers in Southern Arizona.
USING YOUR OBSERVATION DATA
A user on one of the behavior-based safety (BBS) sections of Linkedin.com recently stated that he thought BBS was one of the “simpler” elements of an organization’s safety management system. Though I did not respond at the time, I considered that this comment was probably made by someone whose only experience with BBS was a STOP system, or one of the other relatively basic observation programs promoted by a number of organizations and practitioners.
By Terry E. McSween, founder and CEO, Quality Safety Edge
Last year I had the opportunity to speak with a group of 35 construction and maintenance contractors that were involved in active behavior-based safety (BBS) peer observation processes. I was invited to speak on the topic of improving peer safety observations.
The participants were mostly safety managers from their respective companies with a small number of other managers who worked in the field and had shared responsibility for safety. Also, this was not a random group drawn from the universe of organizations using BBS. They elected to come to a session that was billed as discussing common problems with BBS, so I assumed it was a group representing companies whose BBS programs were struggling with at least some aspects of the BBS process. I was not connected to the participating organizations in any way. I had not met them before nor had QSE worked with any of them. As a result, I had very little background concerning their organizations with which to frame our discussion. Luckily, we have begun using an audience response system that allows us tocollect data and receive feedback from our audience, so I decided to solicit some information from the audience on their specific problems with BBS observations.
Step-by-Step Safety at Embraco Slovakia
A thriving factory with 2200 employees (approximately 1900 of those employees on the production floor) manufacturing high-quality products for customers around the world—this is the Embraco Slovakia plant. Embraco Slovakia is a subsidiary of Embraco—one of the largest worldwide producers of compressors and condensing units for refrigeration. In 2011 this facility in the small town of Spisska’ Nova’ Ves produced an estimated 4 million compressors, including a specialty line exclusively made at this location.