Introduction
Stealing Natural Gas
All safety programs rely on the commitment and involvement of individuals, ranging from the top executives to short-term contractors. For example, the Process Safety Management program from OSHA (the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration) has fourteen elements; the first and most important of these is Employee Participation.
An operator working by himself at one o’clock in the morning may be about to open a valve on a line that connects two tanks. If, before doing so, he spends a few moments going through some of the HAZOP guidewords such as “reverse flow” or “contamination” he may identify a possible accident situation, and decide not to open the valve until he has talked over the proposed action with his supervisor or colleagues. When the operator acts in this manner both the participation and the HAZOP elements of the process safety program are working perfectly.
Ultimately, the safety of those working at an industrial facility depends on the actions of everyone involved. Programs and good intentions – by themselves – achieve nothing. What is needed is actions, i.e., changes in behavior. From this philosophy flows the concept of Behavior Based Safety (BBS).
An effective BBS program [1] comprises the following features:
- Common goals — both employee and managerial involvement in the process
- Definition of what is expected — specifications of target behaviors derived form safety assessments
- Observational data collection
- Decisions about how best to proceed based on those data
- Feedback to associates being observed
- Review
The BBS Process
The BBS process uses positive reinforcement to change unsafe individual behaviors and to encourage safe behaviors. The process starts with a behavioral hazard analysis to identify “at-risk” behaviors. These behaviors can be identified from:
- Incident reports;
- Near miss (hit) observations;
- Job hazard analyses; and
- Employee interviews.
The next step is for observers to watch workers as they carry out tasks and to provide feedback to the workers about their performance, particularly with respect to the list of at-risk behaviors that was developed.
In addition, workers are encouraged to watch one another’s behavior at work and to provide feedback whenever an unsafe behavior is noted.
Confidentiality
The BBS process can create anxiety and even anger if not applied appropriately. No one likes being watched and/or criticized. Therefore it is vital that all observations and comments remain totally private and confidential. If employees believe that the BBS process is just a means of finding someone to blame then the program will collapse. (This does not mean that people are never to blame or that they should not be disciplined, as discussed in the section below to do with accident prone individuals.)
Commitment
An effective Behavior Based Safety program requires a long-term commitment on the part of all employees, managers, contract workers and executives. The use of BBS will lot necessarily lead to quick results, but it should create long-term improvements in safety and performance. Hence an on-going commitment is required.
Work and Home
A person’s behavior is likely not to change all that much – wherever he or she may be. Therefore a BBS program will include a discussion and analysis of events that occur outside the workplace.
Accident Prone Individuals
An assumption that lies behind many safety programs is that people’s behavior falls into a Gaussian or normal distribution. In other words, there is a small number of people who have are very safe, a large number who are close to the average, and a small number who are very unsafe or “accident prone”.
An accident prone individual is shown in the series of photographs below. A photographer has climbed or jumped on to the rock shown (why he has done so is not apparent — the view does not seem to be much different from the rock behind him). The drop below him is 900 meters.
Having taken his photographs he decides to jump back to the lower part of the rock on the right. He has his equipment over his left shoulder, his left hand is holding the equipment, and he is wearing open sandals.
He jumps; he has one hand for himself and one hand to hold on to the equipment.
He lands and slips but is able to grab on to the rock with his one hand. He throws his equipment on to the rock, climbs up, and walks to safety.
Overtraining People in the Middle
One consequence of the Gaussian distribution of safe behaviors is that the overall contribution of the large number of people in the middle to the total number of events is relatively minor. Hence the large amount of time and money spent on training the people in the middle may result in over-kill. Since they are contributing only a small amount to total safety, any improvement in their performance will have a relatively minor effect on overall results. The emphasis should be given to those whose behavior creates most of the unsafe events. Maybe people such as the Grand Canyon leaper should receive more training. However, it may be more realistic and practical either to dismiss such persons or to move them to a job where their unsafe behaviors have less of an impact.
