Behavioral Safety is the marriage of Applied Behavioral Science (the factors that influence human behavior) and Lean principles.
Are your employees actually safe at work or are they just lucky enough to avoid injury?
Has your safety performance plateaued?
Does your safety team talk about “accidents” rather than “incidents”?
Using the combination of these proven scientific methodologies, Behavioral Safety will help you actively shape your safety culture. When you increase employee engagement, you will make your safety program successful.
Some behavioral safety principles are:
- Defining safety value from the eye of the employee
- Making safety observation and continuous improvement ‘blame free’
- Standard work is safe work
- Setting employees up for success to create a safe workplace
- Actively shaping safety culture by reinforcing specific behaviors
Common business issues and pain points that organizations struggle with:
- Employee morale
- Difficulties retaining or recruiting employees to a company with a poor safety record
- Fines and citations for OSHA and other regulatory bodies
- Cost of insurance, medical costs, replacing things and lost production
- Board and Shareholder concerns
- Public perception of the organization
What keeps you awake at night?
- Are current policies, procedures and systems really keeping your employees safe?
- Do you get requests to do MORE safety related stuff (more time for leaders, more meetings, more resources, more signs and more spending) while nothing seems to ever get taken away?
- Have your current safety results plateaued? Do you find that there are diminishing returns for new safety initiatives?
- Is safety is OWNED by the safety department rather than by front line leaders and all employees?
- Does you organization treat all incidents in a equal manner? Does your safety department have a process in place to identify and focus on incidents that have a high potential for serious injury or fatality?
- What does your safety scorecard look like? Do you feel like you are flying blind with poor (or no) data, and at best lagging indicators?
Steps to take:
- Initiate a Behavioral Safety journey by combining the proven improvement methodology of lean sigma with applied behavioral science principles to shift your safety culture
- Integrate Behavioral Safety; rather than layer-on MORE work. Lean out your current process, remove redundancy and teach leaders how to “do different” rather than “do more”
- Engage all leaders and employees in safety; turn your safety department into coaches rather than safety police. Reinforce key behaviors
- Measure with forward looking leading indicators, at risk behaviors, near misses, and incident prevention rather than relying on lagging indicators like TRIR
- Steward to a culture shift plan that includes knowledge transfer, skill building, coaching at all levels and leading behavioral metrics capture to ensure success
Others have succeeded, you can too…
Do You Need Help With Behavioral Safety?
Why not get in touch and see how Flow Consulting can help you with Behavioral Safety improvements.