Insights into Your Safety Culture: Recent Episodes
Dr. Timothy Ludwig
Listen for a quick dose of inspiration and education to help improve the safety culture of your business. A respected leader in benchmarking the best-in-practice Behavioral Safety programs, Dr. Timothy Ludwig has over 30 years experience engaging in foundational research in Behavioral Science. Connect with him to achieve your Safety Culture Change.
Who are the cool kids at your worksite? Is it YOU, the PPE laden vestibule of virtue and wisdom? No offense but I highly doubt it. You might as well go to the costume shop, buy some fairy wings and a halo before walking out in front of the workforce. Regardless, you and your leaders (if they are mindful of their actions) often go out and earnestly try to influence worker behavior.
The reason I’ll bet you don’t truly understand terms like complacency or, on the flip side, ownership is because, if you did, you would have already done something about them. Instead you’re begging your workers to conform to some type of feelings to reach the goal. Nothing could be further from the truth and you're left frustrated.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consider the term “Safety” which is a chameleon of a word. The word used in so many different ways.
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.
Heinrich asserted nearly 75 years ago, “88% of worker injuries are due to the worker’s unsafe act”. He proposed a Safety Domino Theory
If checklists are to be effective as behavior-management tools, you must manage the behavior of using checklists!
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.
Great safety minds think alike! Listen to our discussion about all things safety culture where we bring in insights and experiences from the field. Even talk a little about Dysfunctional Practices!
“Once you get employees talking, they know the right answers,” he says. “The smartest people in the room are the employees. They're on the front line doing the work. They can tell you what the risks are.”
Recently I sat down with Sam Goodman to discuss the tribalism, misunderstandings, and future of Human & Organizational Performance (HOP) and Behavioral Based Safety (BBS).
Listen to find out what I learned during my time in South Africa. Essentially, it's most important to change yourself before you're ever able to begin helping others.
As behavior science is called upon more than ever to address a crisis, I’ve reached out to my network of scientists, consultants, and friends to collect their lists of tips, pinpoints, and tactics to sharpen your behavioral approach to this new reality.
How can we ensure mask wearing compliance in the work place? Enter the T.H.A.N.K.S. Conversation. Based in behavioral science, it utilizes the practical utility of the simple conversation to reinforce difficult behaviors and shape them to fluency over time.
Listen to Dr. Ludwig walk us through a step-by-step example of how one of these behavior-changing conversations might play out.
In this episode, you’ll hear from Dr. Ludwig as he explains the importance of ensuring we are instructing our front-line workers how to be ACTIVE in their health & safety efforts and not entirely focus on what they should NOT do.
Dr. Ludwig has over 30 years of research and practice in behavioral approaches to safety where he integrates his empirical work into his safety consulting. His writings and insights are found on his website at Safety-Doc.com
What does our global attention to hand washing during pandemics teach us about worker compliance around life-critical and other behaviors required for safety?
In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.
In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.
By the time workers find themselves in a position to take risks, we have already lost. There were a whole host of behaviors, done by a host of other people, unaware they have participated in perfectly creating the conditions for workers to take risks. We need to discover the interlocking behaviors that lead to risk taking among Front Line Workers.
Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the shop
Eight elves were busy working
Even Snap, Crackle, and Pop
Get this in your head; tattoo it on the back of your hand to remind you. Behavior is neutral. This simple mantra will set your safety program free of the dysfunctions that kill your safety culture.
When we suffer an incident we want to use every tool in the arsenal to keep it from happening again. And one of the simplest tactics is to create (yet another) rule.
It’s a tricky thing to grow, this safety culture. It’s more than just an engineered process. Luckily we have our families to learn from.
Excellent safety management systems reinforce people for reporting. This does not mean giving out a prize or pat on the back. Reporters get reinforced for reporting because things got better because they reported.
Taken as a whole it seems like complacency is pervasive – the #1 cause of injury. How often does “complacency” show up as one of the causes attributed to the injury or close call?
WHO HAS BEEN IN A TRAINING CLASS where some consultant is teaching you about “Culture”? But, in reality, deep down inside where these things are hidden, you admit to yourself that you really, really don’t know what this term really means.
We can easily make the analogy between a prisoner trying to escape and the hazards and risks related to injuries.
Your safety management systems act like the structure of a building aimed at reducing risk. These systems can fail due to lack of participation. They needed more rebar. Ask yourself: What behaviors do you need to build into your safety processes? What must you reinforce?
The whole program is run by the safety department and few anointed safety enthusiasts who do the observations or supervisors, who have observations cards to complete on top of mounds of other paperwork. Employee involvement is nonexistent. This may seem the most reliable way to do behavioral safety, but it’s creating an undesirable effect inside of the operation.
Your annual injury rate is a static number. It can define your safety program performance but injury rates can seem random. It’s frustrating working so hard to reduce that rate only to have it bounce around arbitrarily.