Third Quarter 1998

Perspectives
in Behavioral Management
TM

BAPP Safety Observations Help
Treviras Spartanburg Site Reduce Incident Frequency

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 Perspectives
TM
in Behavioral Management
Leading Off . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Committed to companies
committed to safety

From the Field

Publisher/CEO
Thomas Krause, PhD
Hoechst Trevira Safety Culture SOARs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
President Stan Hodson & Jim Million
R. Scott Stricoff

Managing Editor Potlatch Safety Success BEARs Watching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Stan Hodson
sjhodson@bscitech.com Sue Hidley & Jim Nichols

Editor
Sue Hidley The ZAP Team at Montell Polyolefins
sihidley@bscitech.com Improves Safety Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Graphic Designers Andrew Stewart
Andrew Gilman
Marty Mellein
LabPROWL Safety Effort
Circulation Manager Helps Change Culture of EXXON Labs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Louise Wong
Sue Hidley & Tom Yorke

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Resources, Tips, & Advice
technology for behavior-based safety.

Unless otherwise indicated, material in The Role of Senior Managers in a Safety Change-Effort . . . . . . 6
this publication is 1998 Behavioral

Stan Hodson, Pat Killimett, & Jim Spigener
Science Technology, Inc. All rights
reserved.

BAPPTrack Software Barrier of the Month
BST Users interested in developing A Report for Ongoing Problem-Solving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
articles for Perspectives are
encouraged to contact Bernadette Raley, Stan Hodson, & Rebecca Timmins
Stan Hodson.

Looking Forward to the

For additional copies of this issue of
Perspectives
Perspectives, or for back issues, please 1999 BST Annual Users Conference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
contact the offices of BST. Linda McLaughlin & Jim Spigener

Hoechst Trevira photographs, including cover, by Robert Hooper, Jr.

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Perspectives in Behavioral Management Third Quarter


Pat Killimett
BST Vice President,
Consulting Services
Before joining BST, Pat Killimett
spent a total of fourteen years
with two U.S. Fortune
companies beginning as a first-line
supervisor and advancing to the
position of Plant Manager. As BST
Vice President of Consulting
Services, Killimett manages BSTs
North American consulting team.
Jim Spigener
BST Vice President,
Seminars & Training
Jim Spigener is a former union
steward of the OCAW labor union.
Starting as a chemcial unit
operator, he rose through
first-level supervision to a position
of superintendent of production.
Spigener was superintendent of
safety at a Fortune chemical down. Wageroll personnel and the stream-
firm where he worked extensively
in self-directed work team
development for the implementa-
tion of TQM measures.
The Role of Senior Managers
in a Safety Change-Effort
Stan Hodson, Patrick Killimett, & Jim Spigener
At many companies that are safety leaders,
managers have launched change-efforts
that affect the way their entire organiza-
tions do safety. Those managers have
exercised their leading role in three ways:
1. They understand and resolve the
employee involvement dilemma.
2. They get beyond the either/or limita-
tions of engineering (hard) solutions
and culture change (soft) solutions.
3. They enable and charge all levels of
their organizations to install and sustain
a total or integrated safety effort.
Capitalizing on
Employee Involvement
The pressure to downsize or rightsize
has had a major impact on business. This
requires meeting targets with fewer per-
sonnel. The situation presents managers
with a challenge: they cannot afford to
wait to launch new safety initiatives, but
neither can they afford to waste scarce re-
sources on ineffective efforts.
Employee involvement has been touted
by some as a solution to this problem. By
delegating safety to wageroll workers,
the thinking goes, we can off-load tasks
from the leaner manager/supervisor ranks.
The fallacy of such thinking is to equate
employee involvement with management
abdication. A key fact is that real em-
ployee involvement must include ALL em-
ployees, from the top of the organization,
lined management team need to cooperate
and share accountabilities to handle tasks
that may be new to each group.
Companies that make this transition
well do so by making system changes that
redesign and reassign roles and responsi-
bilities, with clarity about the behaviors
expected from all levels. Wageroll person-
nel undertake important tasks in the
safety effort, often playing a key role in
monitoring exposures to hazards, provid-
ing reinforcement and guidance to peers
on safety performance, and generating
and using objective data to identify and
resolve system barriers to safety improve-
ment. Management and supervisory per-
sonnel take on new leadership roles and
responsibilities, often serving as visible
Perspectives in Behavioral Management Third Quarter
and active guides to and as resources for
the safety effort.
Behavior-based safety has proven to
be a particularly effective mechanism for
introducing this kind of culture change.
Behavior-based safety allows workgroups
to manage their own performance in
terms of leading indicators (rates of iden-
tified at-risk or safe behaviors) instead of
getting sidetracked on issues of personal-
ity or shopping lists of equipment
changes based on opinion rather than
data. In well-implemented behavior-
based safety processes, both wageroll and
manager/supervisory employees focus on
their common interest in reducing inju-
ries and illnesses.
Although this approach is now in
place at hundreds of industrial sites, it re-
mains new to many managers. When
those managers first consider launching
such a safety change-effort, they often
express typical reservations. They may
not have a clear idea of how to be sup-
portive: What does support really mean in
an employee-driven safety change-effort? Fi-
nally, even though they may be support-
ive, they remain unclear about how to
build the momentum that gets support
from the rest of their organization.
Managers with such doubts can find a
chorus of advisers urging them to under-
take something simpler than a behav-
ior-based safety effort. Although the
menu of simpler options seems at first
quite varied, most of the current alterna-
tives to behavior-based safety fall into
two categories:
Engineering-change (equipment)
solutions, and
Attitude-based solutions.
While each of these components is impor-
tant, each alone achieves only partial re-
sults compared with the new overall chal-
lenge facing managers.
When engineering interventions and
attitude-based interventions are not inte-
grated with each other, they do not help
the organization become more effective as
an organization. That is why forward-
looking managers are staking out a posi-
tion that is beyond this old standoff.
Beyond the Old Standoff Between
Hard & Soft Solutions
In the field of industrial safety, much of
the contrasting advice seems to be offered
by what could be called the Engineering
Team and the Attitude and Awareness
Team. Allowing for the obvious concern
for safety among these dedicated profes-
sionals, we suggest the following summary
of their positions.
The Engineering Team proposes to
idiot proof the production process by
designing out all exposure to injury.
Taken to its extreme, this position seems
to say that perfect design makes it un-
necessary to be concerned about work-
force behavior.
We all know of the crucial contribu-
tion that engineering has made in indus-
trial safety over the decades. As impor-
tant as good engineering continues to be,
it is clear that engineering alone is not
enough. In the dynamic industrial work-
place there are constantly changing con-
ditions and requirements. We call upon
our workers to respond constantly to
these changing conditions, and we must
at some point depend on their ability to
do so with appropriate regard for risk
mitigation.
The Attitude and Awareness Team, on
the other hand, proposes to avoid injury
through attitude or values adjustment.
In safety this means that they hope to over-
come performance barriers through con-
sciousness raising, awareness programs
and the like. However, years of attitude-
based safety efforts demonstrate the limits
of that approach. Good attitude does not
translate into safe behavior.
But why should managers accept any
solution that only addresses one aspect of
safety? And do these solutions accomplish
even their specialized objectives? Is it re-
ally possible, for instance, to design a pro-
duction line that is idiot proof? Not in
our experience. Similarly, no amount of
consciousness-raising or attitude adjust-
ment is going to preserve workers from
cumulative trauma disorders if their work-
stations require sustained body postures
and movements that cause stress.
What is called for is an objective, rigor-
ous approach that integrates a sites pro-
duction hardware (equipment) and its
workforce (behavior) to launch and sus-
tain continuous improvement in safety
performance.
Third Quarter
The Integrated and
Total Approach
Real employee
Behavior-based safety gives managers a
means to achieve continuous improve- involvement must
ment in safety with employees at all levels
playing key roles. It links the issues of include ALL employees,
engineering, business systems, and hu-
man performance. from the top of the
The behavior-based approach. There
is no way to understand why a work- organization, down.
force behaves as it does without looking
at the entire organizational picture: train-
ing, equipment design, business and man-
agement systems, company values, peer
pressure, etc.
The behavior-based perspective often
delivers a sobering message to managers:
If at-risk behavior is the norm at a site, it is
because the site is systematically delivering
consequences that favor at-risk behavior.
Behavior-based safety helps to identify
those barriers to continuous improve-
ment so that they can be eliminated.
The importance of data. The impor-
tance of data goes to the heart of any seri-
ous discussion about continuous im-
provement in safety performance. At the Behavior-based safety
core of many employee or union recom-
mendations is the call for equipment gives managers a means
fixes, redesign, and upgrades (engineer-
ing solutions). For all of these recommen- to achieve continuous
dations, data is absolutely central for
decision making. Basing recommendations improvement in safety
on data elevates the discussion from a
with employees at all
choice among personal opinions about
which changes are most important to a levels playing key roles.
businesslike decision process. Behav-
ioral data is the best kind of data because
it is the only kind that accurately predicts
workgroup performance in advance of It links the issues of
any incidents at all.
Furthermore, in line with calls from engineering, business
safety professionals to treat near-misses/
near-hits very seriously, behavior-based systems, and human
observation is focused on near-hits or po-
performance.
tential injuries because that is what at-
risk behavior is: a near-hit.
Conclusion
Because of these and related gains, for-
ward-looking managers are using behav-
ior-based safety to involve employees at
all levels in data-driven safety change-
efforts that simultaneously improve site
conditions and culture.
Perspectives in Behavioral Management