Behavior-Based Safety: The Controversy Continues

Joe Bush: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s Safety and Health webcast, Behavior-Based Safety: The Controversy Continues, sponsored by Cority. My name is Joe Bush. I am an associate editor with Safety and Health magazine, and I will be moderating today’s session. Thanks for joining us. In a few minutes, we’ll start the presentation, but first I want to go over some preliminary items. The views of today’s speakers and organizations are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Safety Council or Safety and Health magazine. Any mention of a commercial enterprise, product, or publication does not mean the Council or magazine endorses those items.

At the end of today’s webcast, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question, simply type it into the text box in the lower left-hand corner of your screen and click the button for Submit Question. Feel free to ask your question at any time during the presentation. You don’t have to wait for the question and answer session to begin. We will try to answer as many questions as possible, but because of the large number of participants today, we might not get to every question. Any unanswered questions will be forwarded along to today’s speakers. This webcast is archived, so you can access it after today’s live event. To view this webcast and all of our past webcasts, go to safetyandhealthmagazine.com/events.

With that, let’s go ahead and get started. Our speakers today will be Pamala Bobbitt, director of product marketing and channels at Cority, and Judy Agnew, a recognized thought leader in behavior-based safety and safety leadership. Pamala Bobbitt is in charge of the expansion of Cority’s partner program and brings deep expertise in EHS processes and software to the role. Having trained as a chemist, Bobbitt spent more than 15 years as an EHS professional in the pharmaceutical, chemical, and automotive industries. She has spent the last decade at EHS software vendors using her industry expertise to translate business requirements into successful software programs. Judy Agnew is senior vice president of safety solutions with Aubrey Daniels International and has more than 25 years of experience working with clients in a variety of industries. She is the author of three books: Removing Obstacles to Safety with Gail Snyder, Safe by Accident with Aubrey Daniels, and A Supervisor’s Guide to Safety Leadership. Thanks to all of you for tuning into this presentation. Pam and Judy, whenever you’re ready, go ahead and take it away.

Pamala Bobbitt: Thank you, Joe. Thank you, everybody, for attending today. So I just want to start out. Hi, this is Pam. Thank you so much, everybody. I’m happy to be here with Judy today. As an EHS professional for many years now, I go to a lot of conferences. Having been at an automotive manufacturing facility, I embraced behavior-based safety, and knowing the value that it can bring, I helped other customers support their programs as they rolled it out. About a year ago, I was attending a conference in London, and I was quite shocked to find one of the members of a panel, who was the VP of EHS for a large global corporation, saying that he did not believe in behavior-based safety. I was like, wow, well, maybe I’m just naive and I’ve never heard of this before. So who best to reach out to and discuss this with and ask questions than Judy?

So today we’re going to talk about why there seems to be a disconnect, a pro and a con, two sides of the story here for behavior-based safety. The conference I’m at here in Lisbon, Portugal is a global conference with 300 senior level EHS professionals, and we talked about this a lot in some of the sessions today. So first, before I hand it over to Judy, I want to ask all of you on the webinar today: are you currently utilizing any type of behavior-based safety within your organization? So we can get an idea of who is, and then we can help tailor some of the conversation. It also lets me know, because being a true believer in behavior-based safety, I seem to be a little bit set back by those who don’t see it or haven’t put in these programs. I’ll give a little bit more time. We’ve got people still answering, a little bit over 50 percent now of the audience. I’ll give you just a couple more seconds to answer the question.

All right, let’s see from our audience today. Oh, it’s about a 50/50 split, just a little bit above that. 55 percent of you are utilizing behavior-based safety programs right now. All right. So, Judy, I’m going to hand it over to you. Let’s talk about what it is and where this controversy is coming from.

Judy Agnew: Okay. Well, great. Thanks, Pam. I thought the best place to start with this conversation is really to define what behavior-based safety is. Because behavior-based safety has been so popular for the last 25 years, it has really come to mean a wide range of different programs. And I think that’s partly where some of the controversy comes from. There are, unfortunately, too many things that have been called behavior-based safety that really are not behavior-based safety. So let’s start with a definition and then proceed from there to talk about what it is, what it isn’t, and how to use it most effectively.

If you look up behavior-based safety on Wikipedia, there are actually several components of the definition, and I’ll go through them quickly. But the one that I like the most is the first one. It’s the application of the science of behavior to safety problems. And that’s really what it is. Behavior-based safety should always be based on the science of behavior, also known as applied behavior analysis. Some of the other pieces of the definition in Wikipedia are that it’s a process that creates a partnership between management and employees. Too often I’ve seen behavior-based safety programs that are all about the front line, and there’s not a lot of conversation or partnership going on. That’s really not the intention. That’s not the way it should be.

Behavior-based safety focuses on what people do. And I just want to stop there. That’s really what it’s about. This is about behavior. If you think about safety and you think about what it takes to create the safest possible work environment, we’re talking about behavior. Not just the behavior of front line employees, but the behavior of managers, executives, supervisors, engineers. We all have a role to play. We all have things we need to do and do well to create a safe workplace. And that’s really what behavior-based safety is about: how do we create an environment where we get everybody to do the things they need to do to create a safe workplace.

It should involve everybody. Again, early on, BBS was very much focused on the front line, and for good reason. I think the front line had been left out of safety too much, and it was helpful and very important to get the front line more engaged and get people doing observations and providing each other with feedback. But we certainly don’t want to leave out the executives and supervisors and managers. Everybody has a role to play, and we’ve really got to include everybody.

The last piece is that if you understand behavior, you understand that behavior happens within an organizational system. So behavior change is not just about doing observations and giving feedback. It’s also about looking at those organizational systems to understand how they’re influencing behavior. What are our management systems doing? What are our incentive systems doing? What are our pay and promotion systems doing to influence safe or at-risk behavior? A good BBS process should look at those systems and make adjustments to the systems in addition to any kind of increase in feedback and observations.

With that as a definition, I want to talk a little bit about the different methodologies. Behavior-based safety shows up in many different ways, in different systems that various organizations use. If we look at the different methodologies, some of them have peer-to-peer observation systems alone. That’s really what we think of when we think of behavior-based safety: peers observing each other and giving each other feedback. That’s kind of at the heart of behavior-based safety. But some systems have supervisors doing observations as well. Some systems have one long list of behaviors for the entire site, so everybody uses the same checklist. Other systems have targeted behaviors: each department or each function might have their own smaller list of behaviors that they use to do observations. Some systems have a few people doing observations. Some systems invite everybody to do observations. Some systems collect data across an entire site and pool that data together. Others use data by function or by department and provide feedback by department. All of those methodologies can work. And there’s a tremendous amount of data to suggest that a behavior-based safety system that’s really founded on the science of behavior, regardless of any of these variables, can be very, very effective.

I want to talk about what makes any of these systems, whatever process you use, most effective. And it really is looking at what the science tells us about how best to influence behavior. I’m guessing that everybody on this call is familiar with the ABC model, especially those of you, of course, that are doing behavior-based safety. But for those who might not be familiar, let me give you a quick overview. The ABC model is basically the foundation of the science of behavior. It tells us there are two things that influence our behavior. An antecedent is anything that comes before behavior that prompts us to do something. And on the other end are consequences. A consequence is anything, good or bad, that influences behavior.

Antecedents are things like training, signs, slogans, procedures, policies. When you think about safety, we have a lot of stuff that falls into that category of antecedents. There are a lot of things we do around safety that are antecedents. They’re designed to prompt people to engage in safe behavior on the job. Where we have historically not been as good is on the consequence end. And unfortunately, too often the consequences we’ve used in safety have been largely negative, where we stop and talk to people when they’re engaging in at-risk behavior. We correct them. We talk to them when they’ve had an incident. There may be some discipline or some sort of punishment involved. What we need to do, and what the science tells us, is we need to add in more consequences, but not negative ones. We need to add in more positive ones.

The ABC model basically tells us that consequences have the biggest impact on our behavior, not antecedents. And we still need antecedents. Antecedents are necessary, but they’re not sufficient for behavior change. So how does a good BBS system address that? By increasing the amount of feedback and reinforcement that we provide people through those safety observations. In a typical system, peers would be observing each other, and their job at the end of that observation is to provide some feedback and some consequences, ideally positive ones, for the behaviors they’ve observed.

The second thing that we know from the science is that the more immediate a consequence is, the more powerful it is. And the more certain a consequence is, the more powerful it is. Again, if you look historically at what we’ve done in safety, we have these incentive systems, for example, or we have celebrations where we say at the end of the year, if we do everything right, we’re going to have a celebration. Well, the end of the year is too far in the future and it’s too uncertain to be as effective as we want it to be. So part of what BBS is designed to do is to say, look, we need to build in more immediate, more certain consequences, more of the day-to-day kinds of consequences, and that’s really going to drive behavior better and faster. That notion of having people going out and doing observations and giving daily feedback is a huge part of what makes BBS effective.

The third piece is that we know from the science that positive consequences are the most efficient and effective. If we use a lot of positive reinforcement, where we have a heavy focus on catching people doing it the right way instead of catching people doing it the wrong way, then we’re going to create a lot more engagement. We’re going to have much better conversations about safety. Because if you only talk to people about safety when they’re doing something wrong, that starts to build resentment. People are doing the right things most of the time. So part of what we’ve tried to do with behavior-based safety is to say, let’s recognize what people are doing well. And yes, of course, we need to talk to them about the things they’re not doing the right way and help correct that. But if the vast majority of the time people are doing things right, then let’s talk to them about that as well. Let’s ensure that they feel good about the things they do well. That’s going to encourage them to be more willing to be involved in observations, to be more willing to do observations themselves, and to have better, meaningful conversations around safety.

We know that negative consequences are the most common by default. If you let people just do what they do naturally, most people will manage by exception. They will go out and do observations, and they’ll look for at-risk behavior, and then they’ll comment on that. So we know we need to really encourage people to focus on what people are doing well, not just what they’re doing wrong. A behavior-based safety system helps build in some accountability for using more positive reinforcement, for using more positive strategies to influence behavior. A good BBS system should really hit all these components and do them well. And when they do that, they tend to be very, very effective.

I want to spend some time on some of the common objections to behavior-based safety. These are the things you hear, like Pam is probably hearing at the conference, that people say are the problems with it and why we should not use behavior-based safety.

The first one is that BBS blames the worker. This objection is as old as behavior-based safety itself. So where does it come from? It comes from a statement that was repeated over and over again, that 80 percent of incidents are the result of unsafe acts. That statement is misleading. It’s misleading in the sense that it seems to suggest, at least people read into it, that it has nothing to do with hazards, that it’s all about behavior. And it also seems to suggest that it’s therefore the worker’s fault. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, well, if we’ve trained people in safe procedures, and we’ve given them all the tools that they need, and we have meetings and discuss it, and they still do something at risk, then that’s their fault. What I will tell you is that is not at all what the science of behavior would tell you you should do. In fact, BBS actually eliminates blame because it helps us understand the real causes of behavior. If we have people that are normally good workers, who do their job well, who work safely the majority of the time, but occasionally do an at-risk behavior, occasionally take a safety shortcut, the question we should be asking is why. Why would a good person do that? And the answer is that good person is in a bad system. They’re in a system that’s actually encouraging people to do the wrong things. BBS helps us look at that, understand behavior, understand what role management might be playing in inadvertently encouraging at-risk behavior, understand what other organizational systems might be encouraging at-risk behavior. So it’s not at all about blaming the worker. It’s very much about problem solving and understanding why a good worker might make an at-risk choice, and helping them make better choices consistently.

Another objection to behavior-based safety is that BBS results in under-reporting because it includes incentives for not having accidents. This is absolutely false. There is nothing in the science of behavior that would suggest incentives for not having accidents are a good idea. In fact, the science predicts that if you put an incentive in place for not having accidents, you will get under-reporting. We know that to get to that incentive, in particular if it’s a big incentive, people will sometimes hide accidents. So behavior-based safety would predict that that’s going to be a problem. And in fact, I would suggest that behavior-based safety has really helped shine a light on the dangers of those kinds of incentives. If you hear people saying that BBS is about incentives, that’s not true. That’s not BBS. What BBS is about is reinforcing behavior. Reinforcing the preventative behaviors, the things that we need to do to prevent incidents, not reinforcing the lack of accidents. Very, very different message.

Another objection: BBS shifts company focus and resources away from hazards and focuses exclusively on employee behavior. This may have happened in some BBS systems. It’s certainly not promoted by anyone that I know that does good BBS. Could it have been misused at some organizations? I’m sure that is true. I think anyone who really understands behavior-based safety and understands the science would say that it is not a replacement for anything else an organization is doing, and most particularly, hazard remediation. Clearly we want to make sure that all hazards are identified and addressed in an organization. That’s a huge part of safety. And it should work in conjunction with any behavior changes that we might be making. My experience around this is that the more people do behavior-based safety observations, the more hazards they see, and the more hazards they report, and therefore the more hazards get addressed. I have seen this over and over and over again in my 25 years of doing this, where there are hazards that have probably been there for years, but because people are now out and they’re looking more and they’re talking about safety on a daily basis, they’re starting to see some of this stuff through fresh eyes. So I would suggest BBS has actually the opposite effect. A good BBS system should encourage and support hazard recognition and remediation, and most of them would have a component where they’re asking people to not just look at behaviors but also to look for hazards.

Another objection to behavior-based safety is that it ignores the hierarchy of controls. The suggestion here is that behavior-based safety is all about let’s just change behavior, let’s not bother trying to eliminate the hazards or substitute or use engineering controls. Again, this is just completely false. A good BBS system will work in conjunction with other kinds of work you’re doing to eliminate and substitute and do the engineering controls. And in my experience, behavioral observations often lead to ideas around ways to eliminate hazards or better engineering controls. So it actually feeds the higher end of the hierarchy of controls, as opposed to ignoring the hierarchy of controls.

The next objection is the one that I hear from people that are doing behavior-based safety. And since over 50 percent of you are engaged in some behavior-based safety, you may have some of this problem going on in your organization. It’s what people say: we have to hound our people to do observations. We just have to stay on them all the time. We can’t get enough observations. And often along with that, they’ll say people just don’t see the value in behavior-based safety.

So let me talk about that. I have the opportunity not only to go into organizations and implement behavior-based safety, but we are often also called into organizations to do safety leadership work and safety culture work, and in the organization is an existing behavior-based safety system that we have an opportunity to look at. Sometimes we’re asked to come in because somebody’s behavior-based safety system is not working the way they want. So we have the benefit of seeing a lot of different behavior-based safety systems. And I would tell you that too many of those systems involve long observations that take a long time to do. If your observation process requires that someone leaves their work and has to go somewhere and do an observation that takes 20, 30, 40 minutes, you are going to struggle to get people to do observations. They don’t want to stop working and go do observations for a long period of time. They’ve got other things they’ve got to do. I think most of us are busier than we want to be. So that is going to continue to cause a problem.

When people don’t want to do observations, it means you have less data and less feedback and reinforcement. And when you have less feedback and reinforcement, behavior changes more slowly. And when behavior changes more slowly, people think it isn’t working. I want you all to think about a sports analogy, if you’ve got kids that play sports or maybe you’re playing sports. Imagine if a coach said to your kids, okay, guys, I’m going to give you feedback once a month on how you’re doing. And by the way, I use once a month because with a lot of the behavior-based safety systems that clients come to us with concerns about, I’ll ask them, how often are people observed? How often would the average person in your organization have a behavior-based safety observation done? And it is not uncommon for people to say, oh, about once a month. Well, think about that. Again, the sports analogy: if a coach says I’m going to give you feedback once a month, how long is it going to take for that kid or that adult to get better at that sport? The answer is a very long time. What we know from the science, and what we all know from our experience, is the more frequently we get feedback and reinforcement, the faster our behavior changes. So if your behavior-based safety system takes a long time, it’s going to lead to slow behavior change, which is going to lead to people saying, ah, this doesn’t work. After six months, people say, I don’t see any change in behavior. I don’t see any reduction in incidents. This BBS stuff just doesn’t work. It’s not that BBS doesn’t work. It’s that you’re not using it properly. It’s that you are failing to recognize what the science tells us about what an effective system looks like.

So some tips on this. Focus on a few relevant behaviors at a time and do more frequent observations. If your observation takes half an hour to do, look at that list and say, what do we really need to focus on? Or let’s focus on these ones for now and we’ll come back to the other ones later. Anything you can do to make that observation process shorter is going to mean people will do more observations, which means people are going to get more feedback, which means the behavior is going to change faster. The other thing I see in a lot of BBS systems is that the data from observations is collected, and then somebody puts it into a database, and they never share that data back with the group. People want to see, is it having an impact? If I’m going to take time to do observations, or I’m going to allow people to observe me, I want to know that it’s making a difference. So be sure that you share those improvements back with the group. I can’t tell you how many times I see that where it just goes into a black hole and no one really knows whether it’s having an impact or not.

So let me give you some additional tips for designing a behavior-based safety system that is going to be most effective and really work at improving behaviors. The first one is to identify critical behaviors for workers and for management. My suggestion here is start at the front line. What are the things you need your front line workers to do differently? Look at your data. What are your near-miss and your incident data? What is that telling you about the types of behaviors that could prevent those types of injuries? You’re having a lot of hand and finger injuries, or a lot of near misses around back injuries, or whatever it is. Use those data to start to identify the critical behaviors. I also would suggest that you need to not just focus on behaviors related to the types of incidents or near misses you’re having, but also on what people need to do differently to prevent the very serious incidents and fatalities, the high-severity kinds of incidents. And those don’t always show up, as you know. They don’t always show up in your data. But look at those carefully, too. What are the things that people really must do consistently to prevent a serious injury or fatality? A good BBS system should include both of those types of behaviors for front line workers.

Once you’ve identified what you need your front line workers to do, a really important question to ask is, what then should our supervisors do? What’s the role of the supervisor in our BBS system? Are they going to do observations as well? If they’re not going to do observations, how can they support the people that are doing the observations? We’ve got to figure out what those supervisors need to do and be very, very clear about it. I would suggest that too often we tell our supervisors vague things like, well, you just need to support the process. Well, what does that mean? What should the supervisor do today to support the BBS process? So get really specific about what you need on the part of your supervisors. And then going up from there, if you know what you want your supervisors to do, what do you want your managers to do? What should they do to support the supervisors? And so on up the chain, so that it’s clear that we’re pinpointing behaviors not just for the hourly front line workforce, but for everybody in the chain of command, so that everybody understands the role they’re to play and how to play that role as best they possibly can.

The second one: focus on behaviors that are going to have the biggest impact. Again, you should use data for doing that. If you are like many organizations and you don’t have a lot of incidents, and maybe your near-miss reporting system isn’t working as well as you would like, you can certainly do observations and see what kinds of things people tend to be inconsistent about. You can look at other kinds of industry data that will help suggest behaviors. And you can also ask people: where are they tempted to take risks? Where might they be struggling to do things the right way? One of the things that I’ve seen that is not helpful in BBS systems is where organizations pick behaviors to observe that are simply easy to observe. They’ll often have a lot of PPE on their observation lists, for example. And while PPE may be very important, I’ve worked in organizations where they just have all kinds of observations on PPE, but really the things that are most likely to hurt their people are not related to wearing PPE. So be sure that you’re really focusing on the stuff that matters, because if you don’t do that, and you’re asking people to do observations on things that are not as important, then you’re just undermining your BBS system.

The next one is to ensure frequent observation of those critical behaviors. The more we get people observing, the more we build in feedback and consequences. If you can get people to do short observations that only take a few minutes, then people are more likely to be able to do them on a daily basis, or at least a weekly basis. And don’t be shy about using self-observation. I think sometimes people roll their eyes and think self-observation, that’s ridiculous, everyone would just say that they’re doing everything safely. The only reason people would lie on a self-observation scorecard is one of two things. Either there’s some big incentive for getting a good score on your scorecard, which there should never be in a BBS system. Or there’s fear: fear of punishment, fear that if I record that I’ve done something at risk, I’m somehow going to get in trouble for doing that. A good BBS system eliminates those two. And if you’ve got an environment where people are engaging in BBS and they see it as valuable, then self-observation can be a great part of that. It helps increase the amount of observation, and it allows people to talk about how they’re working to change their own behavior, not just working to help each other change behavior.

The next one is to ensure frequent feedback and reinforcement. Again, the more observations we have going on, the more opportunities for feedback and reinforcement. Getting that observation process down to where it’s something that is pretty easy for people to do and fairly quick will help ensure that there’s more feedback and reinforcement. And that feedback and reinforcement happens after an observation, but it also should happen when we gather the data across people and across groups, where we’re coming back and saying, hey, guys, we were at 75 percent last week and now we’re at 80 percent safe. We’re letting people see the impact of their efforts.

Use the science to do collaborative problem solving. Good BBS eliminates blame. As I said earlier, good BBS gives people tools to say, okay, if there’s at-risk behavior happening, there are reasons for that. People don’t behave in at-risk ways because they just don’t care. I mean, sometimes people do, but the vast majority of the time, when you look at incident investigations or you talk to people about at-risk behavior, they’re often doing at-risk behavior to try to do a better job. They’re trying to get the product out the door. They’re trying to do something in a way that is of higher quality, and that’s leading them to be tempted to do things in unsafe ways. Very often people are doing at-risk behaviors because they’re trying to do the right thing. So let’s understand that, and let’s understand what role management plays in encouraging that. If we have supervisors who talk about the importance of getting the product out the door, and how behind we are today, and we’ve got to really get this stuff done today, and oh, by the way, have a safe day. Well, that’s part of the problem. And again, I wouldn’t blame the supervisor either. There’s no reason to blame the worker or blame the supervisor. Let’s just understand that that’s part of the problem and let’s make some adjustments. Let’s change what the supervisor says during those startup meetings to avoid sending the wrong message. So it really is about sitting down and saying, what are the things that are driving at-risk behavior at any level of the organization, and what do we all need to do differently to encourage safe behavior?

Any good BBS system needs to include a link to hazard identification and remediation. If you’ve got a process by which people are supposed to report hazards, make sure there’s a linkage between your BBS system and that system. If you don’t have that in place, use your BBS system to do that. On the scorecards that we use, particularly in the early days when I first started doing this 25 years ago, most organizations didn’t have formal hazard identification systems, so we just from the beginning included a few behaviors and a spot on the scorecard to say what hazards do you see. Write them down, turn them in, and we would create a process whereby supervisors would address the hazards and report back. So we’ve got both of those things going on, because again, when we’ve got people out doing observations, they can be looking for hazards, they can be looking for engineering solutions as well as behaviors.

And the last one is to ensure that your process is having the intended impact, and if it isn’t, adjust it. I see too many people who are sort of blindly following some BBS recipe, where they’re just doing observations, turning in the scorecards, putting it in a database, and nobody stops and looks at it and says, is this having an impact? Are we changing the right behaviors? Are those behaviors leading to a reduction in injuries, a reduction in near misses? And if it’s not, then you need to change what you’re doing. There are adjustments that you can make. And if you use the science of behavior as your guide, that’s your foundation, that’s what you always go back to, then any adjustments you make are only going to make your process better. But don’t just keep following a process that isn’t working for you. Make some adjustments.

A well-designed BBS process that’s really based on the science of behavior can be a critical component of a safety management system. It’s not a replacement for anything, as I said, but it is a good part of a safety management system. Safety is about behavior. Safety is about ensuring people do the right things on the job. So we have to have a process to help people do the right thing. And if we don’t, we end up relying on antecedents, signs and slogans and meetings. We end up relying on nagging people to do the right thing. And we too often end up punishing people when they don’t do the right thing. So instead, let’s be proactive. Let’s build in, based on the science, a way to help people make the safe choices on the job.

Now, one of the things that Pam mentioned, and this is my last slide, and then we’ll do a few more things and then we’ll open it up for questions. As Pam mentioned, and I’ve had this experience recently too, there’s an awful lot of anti-BBS conversation going on out there. And it’s really disturbing to me. I have a PhD in the science of behavior, and I’ve been doing behavior-based safety for so long, and I’ve seen it be so powerful. It’s very disturbing to me to hear people say, oh, it doesn’t work, it’s a bunch of bunk. Or, we’ve got the next best thing, BBS is dead, here’s what y’all need to be doing now. Let me say this. Any process that helps you influence behavior is based on the science of behavior. And remember the first definition I had of BBS, the first definition you see in Wikipedia? BBS is the use of the science of behavior to change behavior in the workplace around safety. So BBS is not dead. The science is not dead. The science of behavior works regardless. Just like the laws of physics work, the laws of behavior work.

There are different ways to do it. There are all kinds of things that people have done over the last 20 years that are not really BBS but have been called BBS, that are not effective. That’s absolutely happened. But to say that BBS doesn’t work, or to say that it’s dead, is to essentially say that the science is dead. And that’s just ridiculous. Could you do something other than the traditional peer observation BBS? Absolutely. Basically, anything you do that identifies critical behaviors and builds in frequent feedback and reinforcement to drive those behaviors, to make sure those behaviors happen, is going to be helpful and effective. We do a lot of safety leadership work where it’s all focused on leaders, on things leaders need to do differently to improve safety. There are lots of different things you could do. It doesn’t have to take the form of what most people think of as traditional BBS. The key is not the process. It’s the principles that the process is based on. The science helps us make good choices, helps other people make consistent, safe choices. And if we stay true to that science, we’re going to be effective. So with that, let me turn it back over to Pam.

Pamala Bobbitt: Yeah, and I just want to stay on this for just a second, Judy, because this is great. Talking about the alternatives, people don’t realize some of these new ways. Today there’s engaging conversation around mindfulness and nudge theory. And if you think about it, mindfulness is really just that self-assessment that you were talking about, right? Just taking a moment and sitting there and thinking, observe, and then, what are you going to do? I think some people don’t see that correlation, and maybe that’s where some of it is coming in. And nudge theory, which we’ve talked about before, I heard about it a couple of years ago, and it continues to come up. For some reason I only hear about it in Europe. I’m sure some people in North America are using it as well. But that’s all based off of human behavior. Setting up your processes to basically take our inherent behavior into account. Today it was pretty interesting: they talked about, if any of you are in Chicago, the road, Lake Shore Drive, and how they designed it to automatically, instinctively make our bodies slow down around the curves, just from the design. So if you think about that, there are so many ways that we are using behavior and adjusting for it. Like painting lines: speed bumps, not putting them there, but painting them, and people automatically slow down.

Judy Agnew: Absolutely. And nudge theory, as I look at it, is really about making it easy for people to do the right thing. In our terminology, it’s about making sure that we’re not building in negative consequences when we want people to do things. And BBS is all about that. We make it so hard sometimes for people to do the right thing. So let’s look at it, and let’s understand what makes it easy for people to do the right thing. And the other thing nudge theory is all about is using positive strategies, and that’s very much in line with what we’ve talked about today.

Pamala Bobbitt: Yeah, and I think one of the things that I’ve seen as well is changing the observation to a conversation, right? Still observing, but putting that human element into it, where instead of just standing with a checklist and writing things down, you’re having that conversation. Because then maybe you are able to do some of the things that you talked about that make a strong program. You’re able to talk one-on-one with that line worker, and they can say, hey, did you see this? Let me show you something, right? And that conversation actually gives you that better observation to address it.

Judy Agnew: Absolutely. And that’s where good observations lead to engineering redesign or discussions about hazards. Because instead of going up to someone and saying, hey, you’re doing it wrong, do it this way, you’re saying, I noticed you did it this way. Tell me why. What’s going on? And then the person says, well, I have to do it this way. You don’t realize, but they put the guard over here, and I can’t possibly use that guard because I have to do it this way. And now you’ve got a meaningful conversation that’s going to lead to true change.

Pamala Bobbitt: So let’s talk about technology, because there’s so much there. Talk about digital transformation: that’s really how you get the buy-in from that senior level. It’s just using technology, right? The technology can support these programs. One, giving visibility. Having that true visibility of the information coming in, the reporting coming out of it, closing that feedback loop. One of the key things that you talk about is making sure that you’re not losing ground, or hounding the employee, and that you’re letting them see that what they’re doing actually has impact. So, for instance, if they’re putting in an observation or information, getting an email back or an indication back that says, hey, by the way, this led to this corrective action, this corrective action was closed, here’s what was done. That makes them feel part of that process.

And when we talk about that conversation versus observation, it enables them to give immediate feedback based off of their conversation. So if the management team or the team leader, whoever’s conducting that conversation, is leading it, they’re going to write down their report, right? But having that feedback from the employee to say, well, how was that experience for you? How much of the conversation did you talk versus the person interviewing you? It gives feedback both to the employee, making them feel part of it, but also back to the person conducting the interview. So if they’re spending a lot of time talking to the employee and not with the employee, you can get that immediate feedback and make those adjustments, as you talked about. And then it makes the link. With technology, it’s going to make those links to impact for you. How many observations did we do? What kind of action plans related to that? And then seeing that incident rate, now with analytics and reporting, you can make those correlations easier, to really give you that impact to your safety culture, which I think is what we all want from a behavior-based safety program.

To me, all of this comes into bringing in what we call operational excellence. Tying in your programs with technology so that you’re able to easily do the administration of it, do that reporting, give feedback to every person in the process from the line worker all the way up to the C-level, so everybody feels part of it, linking that together into operational excellence.

So with that, I think I’m going to go to the last poll question today before we open it up for Q&A. Judy talked about how a well-designed behavior-based process is based on the science of behavior, and it can be a critical component of a robust safety management program. We just want to get an idea from everyone on the line of how much you agree. We know that about 55 percent of you were already bringing in behavior-based safety programs. Do you agree with what we’ve talked about today, that if it’s well-designed and you’re taking these things into consideration, it can be a critical component of your safety management program? I’ll give you just a minute to think about that. All right. Well, let’s see the results. Wow. Judy, it makes me happy to see that.

Judy Agnew: Yeah. That’s great. Makes me happy as well. That’s fantastic.

Pamala Bobbitt: So with that, I think we will go over to the Q&A.

Joe Bush: Excellent. Great job, Pam and Judy. Thanks for your insights and expertise. Now, let’s get to some questions. You say BBS should include identifying hazards also, so should that be part of the observation scorecard?

Judy Agnew: You know, I think it should be if an organization doesn’t have some other mechanism for doing that, and many do. But I always like to have it on the BBS scorecard regardless, because again, when people are out doing those observations and having those conversations, inevitably hazard conversations come up. So I like to see it right on the scorecard.

Joe Bush: How can you avoid a sense of blame for at-risk behavior when part of BBS is to talk to people when they are observed doing something at risk?

Judy Agnew: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because, of course, when we are observing, we are going to see some people doing at-risk behaviors, and we need to talk to them about it. And I think it really goes back to what Pam said. It’s about a conversation. It’s not about saying, hey, gotcha, you’re doing it wrong, you need to change what you’re doing. It’s about asking questions. I see you doing it this way, and I’m making sure they do know the right way to do it, but then saying, what is it that encourages you to do it the wrong way? Is there something we can change about the design, or about the pressures that you’re under? So it really is about asking questions, so that even when people are being talked to because they’re doing something at risk, it feels like a problem-solving conversation, not a blaming conversation. And I always tell people, look, if one person is doing something in an at-risk way, chances are pretty good other people are doing it as well. So that’s another thing you can coach your observers to say: look, I want to know why you’re doing it this way, because I bet you’re not the only one. So please help me understand, so we can make it better for everybody.

Joe Bush: What is the role of leaders in BBS?

Judy Agnew: That’s going to depend on the process. As I said earlier, too often there is no role for leaders, or the role is very vague, like they’re just supposed to support the process. Certainly if you’ve got a peer observation system, then one of the roles of leaders should be to reinforce the people for doing observations, to look at the data and have conversations about it, to participate in the problem solving. And certainly be careful with how they react to incidents. So there are lots of different things that leaders can do, and it’s going to depend to some extent on what kind of a BBS process you’ve got, who’s doing observations, what the observation process looks like, that sort of thing. But my advice is, be very, very pinpointed about what you want your leaders to do, and that’s going to increase the probability that they’re going to do those things.

Yeah, that’s another good question, because again, as we’ve been talking about today, there is a lot of skepticism around BBS. I mean, there always was. In the early days we always had to convince the front line this wasn’t about policing, it wasn’t about catching people doing it wrong. So I think you just talk to people about the fact that we understand that we all do at-risk things, and there are reasons for that. There are things happening in the work environment that unfortunately encourage us sometimes to take those shortcuts. So BBS is not about blaming. BBS is about, let’s all work together to figure out what those things are, and, getting back to the nudge theory idea, let’s make it as easy as possible for people to make safe choices. And if you talk about it that way, if this is about helping, then you don’t get that resistance. Sorry, Pam.

Pamala Bobbitt: Yeah, no, sorry. I was just excited to jump in, because one of the things that was discussed in the conference today that I’ve been a huge proponent of is personalizing it for the worker, right? For those who have the skepticism, not only giving them that visibility to allow them to feel part of the process, but also making it personal to them. Understanding what they care about, and then making that correlation to the things that they care about. One of the companies today talked about an example: at a shift, they would have the workers write down what matters to them most in life. What are the things they enjoy in life, and what matters to them? And then you get to know your peers that way. It’s kind of a team building thing. But when you have those conversations, say one of them was going to the theater with their child, you say, these are the things, we do this so that we ensure we’re working in a safe way, that we’re helping eliminate or put the barriers to the hazards, so that you can go to the theater with your child, right? Doing that personalizing element really helps with the skepticism as well.

Judy Agnew: Yeah, I agree. That’s a great thing to do. It’s an exercise that we build into some of our training, too, to just remind people, because sometimes it becomes all about rules and following rules, and we forget it’s about human beings staying safe and being able to go home and hug their kids and play baseball or whatever they want to do.

Joe Bush: How do you prompt new supervisors to do effective BBS observations?

Judy Agnew: Well, that’s a good question. What I would say to a supervisor, especially a new one, is a big part of what you need to do as a supervisor is get to know your people. The more you know your people, the more you develop a relationship with the people that report to you, the more effective you’re going to be as a supervisor in general, but certainly as a supervisor of safety. Observations give you an opportunity to get to know people. Again, if you approach the observation as an opportunity to have a conversation with people, and you use a lot of good questions, then you’re going to learn about people, and they’re going to feel listened to and valued, and that’s going to help you build your relationships with those people. We’ve got to get people away from thinking observations are a policing mechanism. It’s not. I like what Pam said. It’s a conversation, and that’s helpful to both parties.

Joe Bush: Okay, last question. In most cases, what is the most challenging aspect of BBS that receives pushback from employees and employers?

Judy Agnew: I think probably time. The time it takes is probably the number one pushback. We’ve talked about some of the other things, fear of it being a policing system and that sort of thing, but people often are concerned about how much time it’s going to take. And that’s why in some of my tips I said, do what you can to focus on the critical few. You can’t fix every behavior all at once. We don’t start New Year’s Eve by saying, here are my New Year’s resolutions, there are 35 of them. We can’t change that many behaviors at one time. So focusing on a few at a time minimizes the amount of time it takes to do the observations. That makes the conversation shorter but more targeted. And in my experience, that helps people get past their fear of how much time it’s going to take. I tell people you should be able to do observations every day, and it shouldn’t be more than a few minutes a day. And don’t you have a few minutes a day to improve safety? And, of course, who could say no to that?

Joe Bush: Thank you, Pam and Judy. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. I’m sorry we didn’t get to everyone’s questions, but all of today’s unanswered questions will be forwarded to our speakers. That ends today’s Safety and Health webcast. I’d like to thank Pam Bobbitt and Judy Agnew, everyone at Cority, and all of you who listened in. Thanks and have a great day.