Improving Your Safety
With a Behavioral Approach
(Reprinted from Hydrocarbon Processing)

What is management's role?

Terry E. McSween

Management has to have a very clearly defined role to ensure the survival of a behavioral safety process. Managers have several key responsibilities to ensure the success of the safety improvement effort.

• They must ensure that observations occur within required periods when employees in their area are scheduled to be observers.
• They must conduct their own scheduled observations.
• They must participate in Steering Committee meetings and provide input at milestone reviews.
• They must participate in kick-off meetings when the safety team introduces observation process to employees.

Finally, management must takes actions to ensure that all observations occur on schedule. Management should not respond to the observation data. The observation data is a tool for employees to use in safety meetings. Too much pressure on the observation data will bias reporting and destroy the integrity of the observation process. If management attempts to use corrective action or to punish employees for low observation scores, the observers will ensure that their areas look good. The observation process then becomes a numbers game, which defeats its purpose.

Table 8 presents some of common configurations for behavioral safety processes.

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS NEXT SECTION

This article first appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing (August 1993) and is reproduced here with permission.