Dramatic Safety Improvement
30% improvement in overall safety metrics
Case Studies
Business Issue
Maintain a sustainable competitive advantage by creating an industry-leading behavior-based safety program (Behavioral Safety) for one of North America’s largest industrial scaffolding service providers. They were looking for a way to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage by creating an industry-leading behavior-based safety (BBS) program. Previous BBS efforts had resulted in improvement but lacked full behavioral anchoring; the results had been consistent across work sites and improvement was leveling off.
Approach Used
Flow Consulting collaborated with the company to develop a unique Behavioral Lean Sigma program to strengthen the existing BBS program, ensure sustainability of gains and to continually improve safety performance. The program is unique in that it provides a methodology for company leaders to understand why people are, or are not following safety procedures and what to do about it.
Lean practitioners who are familiar with the classic DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process improvement cycle all agree that the final element — Control — is one of the most difficult to attain. Control requires that the process improvement initiative survive the test of time and become a sustainable habit. Behavioral Lean Sigma employs the tenants of Applied Behavioral Science to create “want to” rather than “have to” behaviors to ensure sustainability.
Flow Consulting rolled out the program first to the company President and all the Vice-Presidents to help ground them in Behavioral Lean Sigma techniques. Flow then took the program to the field and helped to establish a team of Safety Champions representing a cross section of field leaders from across the company. The Safety Champions participated in a 2 day working session to both learn Behavioral Lean Sigma techniques and simultaneously apply them to the real-time safety challenge facing them. All went to work sites to observe current practices and to test drive new intervention and safety coaching techniques.
As the team progressed through the DMAIC phases of our customized Behavioral Lean Sigma program the existing system and results were analyzed; the program was behaviorally anchored, refined and field piloted to test improvements. In addition to the training, Flow Consulting provided extensive on-site mentoring by participating in field visits with the Safety Champions to roll out the new program and to ensure knowledge transfer.
Results
The new safety approach facilitated by Flow has resulted in a 30% improvement in overall safety metrics for the company to date and the trend is continuing to improve.