Quality Safety Edge: Behavior Based Safety -- Values and Behavior: Building a Culture that Promotes Safety

Values are a function of our beliefs, knowledge, and skills. With regard to safety, we develop knowledge and skills through formal education and training. Unfortunately, beliefs acquired through experience are often more critical in determining behavior than knowledge and skills acquired externally and thus have a greater impact on behavior than the rules gained via formal educational experiences. One of the advantages of behavior-based approaches to safety is the experience they provide. For example, several studies indicate that conducting behavioral safety observations as specified on a checklist causes observers to be more consistent when they themselves perform the listed practices, even when they get no external feedback while doing so (cf. Alvero, Olson, and Austin, 1999). Conducting behavioral safety observations consequently appears to provide experience that helps people acquire more applicable and therefore improved beliefs about safety practices, thereby strengthening their personal value for those safety practices.

The discussions that take place in the context of behavioral safety also help build stronger personal value for safety in other ways. When an employee provides verbal feedback to a peer promoting the use of fall protection, for instance, that employee is more likely to remember times when he failed to use proper fall protection under similar circumstances. The recognition of this discrepancy – between what an employee publicly promotes and his actual personal practices – contributes to the employee to being more consistent in the use of fall protection in the future. Scott Geller has referred to this phenomenon as the “hypocrisy effect” (Geller, 2000). Widely researched as reported in social psychology literature, this phenomenon is also often referred to as cognitive dissonance. While some have hypothesized that cognitive mechanisms are responsible for this phenomenon, the behavior changes that occur are easily understood in terms of a learning history with a community that values consistency between words and action. Most of us value those who “walk the talk.” Further, we are often critical of those who lack such consistency. For example, if a supervisor talks positively about safety in a safety meeting but later compromises safety to meet production targets, it is appropriate to criticize him for “talking out of both sides of his mouth.” It is also appropriate to seek to improve applicable educational and accountability systems to encourage him be a better safety leader by “showing the way” more consistently.

This last example also illustrates the importance of having organizational values and formal systems aligned in support of practices consistent with our safety values. Certainly the best strategy for encouraging stronger personal values for safety is through formal systems and cultural values aligned to support safety practices and decisions at every level of the organization.

Published in Proceedings of ASSE's Professional Development Conference, American Society of Safety Engineers. Nashville, TX, June 2002, and also presented at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) meeting April 11, 2005.

How Do We Establish Safety as a Personal Value?