Safety auditors now become the safety police. I haven’t talked to a safety professional who hasn’t bristled at the notion that, at least part of their job is to serve as the safety police. Sad but true. One would think that the front line supervisor should be playing the role of rule enforcer. After all, it is probably in their job description and they are the folks most likely to be present when front line workers violate rules, or at least present enough to learn that it happened because of equipment damage, a disrupted process, or their own spidey-senses (supervisors know).

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Acting safely can be punishing! Safety is punishing because it creates a Response Cost. A famous behavioral dude named Tom Glibert made a strong point in his Behavioral Engineering Model: Behavior is costly.

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How much do you know about your workforce’s minor injuries? What is your reporting culture around minor injuries? What percentage of minor injuries do you know about? Some of these minor injuries are above the waterline. This could be the case if a worker suffers a cut and seeks first aid and it gets recorded or a manager witnesses the minor injury. You can also see some of the iceberg right below the waterline, although it may be distorted. Here we may learn about a minor injury sometime after the fact or learn about one through the grapevine.

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Labels are Easy. It’s quite easy to give ourselves a label, isn’t it? We look at our behavior, see the outcome of it, and we give ourselves a label. In fact, labeling is quite popular in modern business where management training often involves some personality test like the Colors or the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Inventory) where we learn everyone’s label in hopes of better collaboration. We are taught to describe ourselves

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Now listen carefully: your system is perfectly designed to get the results you received… because your system is perfectly designed to produce the behaviors you shaped. You built it, folks. You and your engineers, and your managers, and your industry egg-heads, and your consultants, and people you’ll never know who built parts of your system long ago. All of you constructed the systems, processes and environment that put the worker in a position to take the risk.

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It is conventional wisdom. Don’t do things that can get you hurt. After all, who wants to get hurt? Who wants their life changed because of something that happened at work? I think we can all agree that getting hurt at work really sucks for all involved.

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Have you heard the old adage: You can’t manage what you can’t measure? Frankly, if you cannot measure something, you’re merely guessing. There is too much at stake in safety to guess. Your job, in fact everyone’s job, indeed the job of ALL your safety management systems and processes is to measure behavior. Because it takes discipline, measurement is the hardest management practice to execute, yet the most essential. And that discipline is practiced through observation.

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Our attitudes don’t always translate into behaviors. That’s the bottom line. Similarly, attitudes of workers, supervisors and leaders don’t always translate to the critical safety behaviors needed at work. Similarly, values and intentions also don’t always translate to actions either.

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Fear is the Devil of safety programs, while trust is the safety program Saint. It’s true that management actions can reduce fear, but as any leader trying to change a culture knows, you need those small wins to reinforce the trust your workforce can demonstrate when they open up and start to report.

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Fortunately, getting your feelings hurt is NOT a recordable incident. True, no OSHA or other government reporting need be done, no incident investigations must ensue, and I’m not sure it even qualifies as a near miss. Instead, I’d argue it is the opposite of an incident.

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To maintain the most optimized processes, we need to foster a safety culture that fosters “attentive human beings” who are on the alert for something out of the ordinary that may result in an injury or process event.

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The real threat to driving safety is the autopilot we all develop over a lifetime of driving for personal reasons outside of the work setting.  

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We hear a lot about Safety Values. Many folks say that we all have to value safety to create a safety culture that will keep incidents down. When pressed on what a “value” is you usually hear something about a feeling, deep down, where “safety is first,” or “caring is a way of life”. I get that and agree… but as someone who trumpets Behavioral Safety I want something more tangible…something I can see… a behavior I can teach and reinforce.

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Feedback is one of those unique tools that serves as both a consequence and an antecedent to behavior. As a consequence, feedback occurs after the behavior and can reinforce and shape behavior. As an antecedent, feedback helps direct changes in the quality or quantity of subsequent behavior because performance can be compared to a goal, standard, or prior performance.

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If you don’t understand variance your view of the world blinds you to risk. Deming said that one of the greatest threats to organizational quality (and safety from my perspective) is “single data-point management” too often practiced by managers who don’t understand the concept of variability.

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Consider the term “Safety” which is a chameleon of a word. The word used in so many different ways.

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Our body is equipped with automatic protective wiring that automatically reacts to scary stimuli with a fear response. This Fear reaction can then be transferred to otherwise neutral stimuli through experience.

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Heinrich asserted nearly 75 years ago, “88% of worker injuries are due to the worker’s unsafe act”. He proposed a Safety Domino Theory

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If checklists are to be effective as behavior-management tools, you must manage the behavior of using checklists!

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I had an opportunity to discuss a hi-po close call with a plant manager at a petrochemical plant recently. He was alarmed at his people who ignored an alarm.

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