Page 51 - Occupational Health & Safety, December 2018

BEHAVIOR-BASED SAFETY
BBS & HOP = Predictive-Based Safety
With accuracy rates as high as 86 percent, predictive analytics have helped organizations save lives.
BY CHUCK PETTINGERThe Safety field has made continual progress over many decades; however, many orga- nizations have reached a plateau and are looking to move from great to world-class. Companies have robust training and effective safety processes, yet struggle making continuous safety im- provements. Great organizations also implement pro- cesses like Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) and Human Organizational Performance (HOP) to supplement their compliance-driven programs, yet people are still getting hurt. Although, some people claim that “HOP is the archenemy of BBS” and have set up BBS as a “strawman” to HOP. This article will discuss the next safety evolution will occur through a synthesis, not division, of BBS and HOP using system analysis and predictive analytics to create a more proactive “Pre-
dictive-Based Safety” process.
Behavior-Based Safety (BBS)
To reduce the number of injuries, organizations use audits or inspections to judge compliance with their policies and procedures. BBS focuses more on observ- able safety-related behaviors, rather than on whether people are following rules. Thus, a robust BBS process does not replace audits or inspections; it simply looks at safety from a coaching versus policing perspective. Once a risky behavior is identified, employees analyze system and environmental factors influencing the risky behavior, brainstorm improvements, and then use future observations to verify those changes. Focus on behavior does not place blame but helps identify where organizations might be drifting into potential failure. Thus, observing someone doing something risky helps the employees examine the presence or ab- sence of safety “barriers,” not just on catching some- one doing something wrong. Finally, BBS focuses more on the coaching relationship between employ- ees, and stresses the importance of the conversation, not just fault-finding.
The origins of BBS stem from Applied Behavior Analysis (not from Heinrich, as often misquoted). This discipline focuses on organizational aspects di- recting and motivate peoples’ safety-related behav- iors. BBS began with the Komaki’s (1978) study of safety-related performance feedback, improved upon with research by Geller, who coined the term “Behav- ior-Based Safety” back in the 1980s.
Employee engagement is at the heart of successful BBS processes. However, even with the best imple-
mentation, many processes struggle to maintain their momentum. This can be caused by lack of leadership engagement, lack of resources for the BBS team, not using their observation intelligence, or more typically, no sustainability plan. With organizations asking for increases in efficiency, without the BBS practitioner providing a value proposition to their leadership or fellow employees, these processes begin to lose their internal support. To improve your BBS process, prac- titioners need not start from the beginning, they sim- ply need to evolve their process.
Human Organizational Performance (HOP)
In 1982, on the heels of BBS, clinical psychologists in the UK began their research on cognitive failures and classifying slips and errors. This research was then followed by Human Error founders Rasmussen and Reason. Rasmussen (1986) further classified types of human error into knowledge, rule, or skill-based. Reason (1990) gave his “swiss cheese model” to il- lustrate layers of defenses with the holes represent- ing latent weaknesses in our processes and systems. Reason hypothesized that incidents occurred when all the holes (latent weaknesses) are aligned. Thus, the field of Human Error focused on identifying those weaknesses and closing the identified gaps. Dekker in 2002 gave us his “new view” where we should not ask who failed, but what failed. Dekker focused on under- standing the situation, context, systems and processes that facilitated the errors, and how organizations can “drift into failure” (2011). Over time, the name “Hu- man Error” was changed to a less fault-find and more positive broader label of Human Organizational Per- formance (HOP).
HOP tools include methods to identify latent weaknesses by looking at learning teams, pre/post-job briefs, (pre)accident investigations, and error-likely situations. One of major contributions is teaching or- ganizations how to react to failure and get out of the blame, shame and train mentality. Much like BBS, if sustainability strategies are not used, HOP initiatives can lose momentum and become the “flavor of the week.” Many HOP initiatives fall into the “train and pray” methodology, without institutionalizing a pro- cess to keep the momentum going. In this case, HOP initiatives track nothing to demonstrate their value— although some HOP initiatives do collect a lot of data but again struggle putting that valuable data to use. There seems to be an opportunity for a synergy, not
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DECEMBER 2018 | Occupational Health & Safety 47