Posted By Dominic Cooper
Hi Guys
Good Question and some thoughtful answers. Like any improvement intiative there can be problems. Most of the problems with behavioural safety boil down to a lack of management's commitment and lack of employee ownership.
These problems tend to stem from the design of the process and the way it is implemented in the first place (see
http://www.behavioural-safety.com/images/White.pdf). For example, [1] not targeting the 20% of behaviours responsible for 80% of the incidents, relying instead on 'generic' observation cards that attempt to cover everything; [2] minimal observation 'contact rates'; [3] not collating or using the observation data to give feedback to the workgroups, etc, etc.
Nigel is also correct that many behavioural safety intiatives only focus on 'employees' behaviour, not the behaviours of everyone involved throughout the acccident causation chain (e.g. managers). I am a strong believer in using Behavioural Safety to create a 'Safety Partnership' between management and employees, that covers the safety-related behaviours of everyone (e.g. purchasing & supply, HR, Engineering, etc) shown by root cause analyses to be heavily implicated in incidents. British behavioural safety research has shown managements safety leadership behavior is related to employee safety behaviour by anywhere between 35-51% ( see
http://bsms-inc.com/Docu...mmittment-Cooper-013.pdf). Thus, managements inclusion in a behavioural safety process is vital to success. In addition (in accordance with James Reason's 'Swiss Cheese' model) the involvement of those in typical support functions such as HR, Purchasing & Supply, etc is equally as vital (ABC anlyses shows these functions are consistently involved in about 40% of all incidents!). I would wager many have not even considered focusing on the decision-making and safety-related behaviours of these functions as part of their Behavioural Safety process.
The quality and effectiveness of behavioural safety processes can be assessed using the 'Behavioural Safety Maturity Ladder (see
http://www.b-safe.net/be...ety_maturity_ladder.html) to help overcome some of the typical problems. In essence the ladder shows that increasing coverage, use of leading indicators and more involvement lead to greater injury reductions (the Maturity Ladder is underpinned by sound, scientifc behavioural safety research and 20 years practical experience in the field).
As for zero injuries, it is possible with time and effort: e.g SABIC Petrochemicals (UK) Ltd on the Wilton Site at Middlesbrough has acheived a TRIR of 0.05 (inclusive of contractors), but it took 12 years of concerted effort. Another client with 47,000 third-party nationals on LNG construction in Qatar (RasGas) achieved 136 million man-hours LTI free (within 2 years). OGP and Shell Global Solutions both recognised RasGas as the safest 'upstream' Oil & Gas company in the world, 2 years running! Behavioral Safety was a fairly major part of the overall SMS system. These examples make the point that it is important to integrate the behavioural safety process into the mainstream SMS from the outset, and keep working at it: as my grandmother taught me' you only get results out of something, if you put something (i.e. effort) in. Behavioural safety requires a consistency of focus, purpose and execution. How many of the problems described result from a failure of one or more of these three attributes?