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

The team process

Terry E. McSween

During implementation, one of your goals is to ensure that you have broad organizational ownership for the enhancements you are recommending. The only way to create such ownership is by involving others in the final design and implementation process. Thus, as you conduct your assessment you should plan a potential team structure to finalize and initiate the implementation plans. The team structure should include two levels, one to provide management review and another to develop detailed implementation plans based on the assessment report. The plan in the assessment report will thus provide a preliminary plan that the design team uses as a starting point for developing detailed recommendations. The design team will generally develop additional details and implement the behavioral safety process, then move into an advisory role once implementation is underway, as illustrated in the figure below. During the assessment you should also identify a preliminary list of participants for the teams. The design team should generally include the personnel that will ultimately be involved in conducting the observations. Thus if your initial plan is for supervisors to conduct the observations, then supervisors should be represented on the design team.

Figure 3. Team structure for implementing behavioral safety process.

The assessment report will be the design document for implementation. The recommendations in the report serve as a preliminary design and provide a starting point for the design team. On studying the recommendations, the design team can decide whether to support, change, or discard them. Most often, the design team will revise the recommendations based on their experience and knowledge of the organization. They can then develop the additional procedural details required for implementation.

The behavioral safety process.

Generally your design and implementation efforts will follow a six-step process (Table 1). For simplicity, these steps will be presented in sequence. In practice, some of the steps may occur concurrently. For example, the area kick-off meeting (Step 2) beginning of training (also Step 2) and the graphs of observation data (a Step 3 activity) are often initiated at approximately the same time.

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