Behavior is Costly
Acting safely can be punishing! For example, putting on personal protective equipment is punishing because PPE is not convenient, takes extra effort, is cumbersome, and can look silly. Having to get a permit before working in enclosed spaces takes extra effort, is not convenient, and you feel silly having another worker tell you what to do. Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO), submitting a maintenance request, doing a behavioral observation, reporting a hazard or close call, double checking energy, safe egress, housekeeping… do the math:
Costs of safety – an inconvenient action that takes extra effort in cumbersome ways that look silly
Benefits of safety – nothing happens (you don’t get hurt)
How did the math work out for you? Did the benefits outweigh the costs? Nope, in almost every safety system, process, procedure and action, the costs outweigh the benefits.
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.
Body movement takes effort costly to the organism (in our case – humans) in calories, time, and brain space. Animals are built to move, we are active, alive creatures on missions. However, we don’t give up effort lightly. We only want to spend this effort on behaviors that produce something, something Gilbert called ‘valuable accomplishments’.
Our costly behavior needs to create valuable accomplishments – cost/benefit.
Delayed or improbable accomplishments are less valuable than accomplishments we can experience, with probability, in the moment.
Gilbert called this his “Leisurely Theorum” – a name that suggests all animals prefer leisure. Anything that gets us off our butts—a costly behavior—better be worth the accomplishment. We get our butts out of our houses to go to work which accomplishes our paycheck. At work, our costly behavior may accomplish something tangible: a widget for a customer, a chemical test confirming our numbers, a fixed piece of equipment.
When we engage in costly behavior to follow a safety protocol, what happens? What is accomplished?
Nothing, nothing happens.
When we avoid injury, nothing happens, which is good because no one got hurt … but it doesn’t count as an accomplishment. When we follow safety protocols we can avoid the punishment of company discipline. So, again, nothing happens, no accomplishment.
Safety often requires a high response cost and no apparent accomplishment. Over time, safe behaviors, emphasized in training, talked about from time to time, engaged in with the best intentions… safe behaviors will begin to extinguish. They will happen less and less reliably. It is often not a conscious effort to avoid safety behaviors, we just deviate from the safety protocols without knowing it. When everyone starts doing this we begin to normalize deviance.
Now, if you are betting that your punishment system will beat out safety’s punishment system, you’ll be losing that bet and your workers' behaviors will prove it. You may think you're putting your thumb on the cost/benefit scale to counter the costs of safety. The discipline program adds another benefit to acting safely: I avoid discipline if I act safely.
Let’s recalculate the math:
Costs: An inconvenient action that takes extra effort in cumbersome ways that look silly
Benefits: Nothing happens (you don’t get hurt)
+
Nothing happens (you don’t get in trouble)
What does this math tell us? For those of you unfamiliar with math: 0 x 2 = 0. Note that we don’t experience “probability", we experience nothing. But we do experience, with full probability, the negative costs of many safety behaviors, which is a bummer. So whatever the costs are, they are rarely balanced by the benefits:
Negative costs divided by zero benefits = punishment (a decrease in safety behavior)