The RAD Group

Unsafe Behavior Is a Downstream Indicator

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:57:14 -0500

At first glance, the suggestion that behavior is a “downstream” indicator may seem ridiculous, because in the world of safety and accident prevention, behavior is almost universally viewed as an “upstream” or “leading” indicator. The more unsafe behaviors that are occurring, the more likely you are to have an undesired event and thus an increase in incident rate (downstream or lagging indicator). This view is the basis for most “behavior based safety” programs. Over the past few years, however, there has been a great deal of research in the area of human factors, which suggests that there are variables more upstream than behavior that can help us decrease the chances of an incident. The human factors approach views an individual’s behavior as a component of a much more complex system, which includes contextual factors such as social (supervisory and peer) climate, organizational climate (rules, values, incentives, etc.), environmental climate (weather, equipment, signage, etc.), and regulatory climate (OSHA, BOEME, etc.). Individuals work within these climates, evaluate action based on their interpretation of these climates and then act based on that evaluation. Research has shown that individuals, for the most part, make rational decisions based on the information that they have at their disposal in the moment. If an individual “understands” that her boss really rewards speed, then she is more likely to pick up speed even if she is not capable of working at that speed, thus increasing the likelihood of having an incident. While speed of performance is a behavior, it is the result of the person’s knowledge of the demands of the climate and is therefore a downstream indicator. Evaluating and impacting the climate is father upstream and so should be the focus of our intervention programs. When we can impact the decision making process (upstream), we can have a much better chance of creating safe/desired behavior (downstream), which, in turn, decreases the chances of an incident (downstream).

Copyright © 2011 The RAD Group. All rights reserved.

Are you a “Best Boss”?

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:46:12 -0500

For the past 25+ years and with thousands of participants, we have been conducting an informal survey to determine the characteristics of those people deemed to be “best bosses”. While teaching supervisors how to manage the performance of their direct reports, we had them participate in an exercise where they listed the characteristics of the best boss they had ever had. We noticed that there was a lot of consistency across groups and around the world. We came to call the leadership style that emerged from the data “The Facilitative-Relational Leader”, because these bosses used skills to create an environment that made it easier for their team members to express their ideas and achieve their objectives. While there is some variance in the lists that were generated, there are 20 characteristics that always showed up. They are:
1. Cares about the success of others
2. Excellent communicator
3. Honest and trustworthy
4. Shows trust by delegating effectively
5. Fair and consistent
6. Competent and knowledgeable
7. Rewards/recognizes success
8. Motivates
9. Enables success
10. Leads by example
11. Loyal to employees
12. Friendly
13. Good problem solver
14. Team builder
15. Flexible and willing to change when necessary
16. Good planner/organizer
17. Good decision maker
18. Shows respect to others
19. Holds himself and others accountable for expected results
20. Deals effectively with conflict
Over the next few weeks, we are going to address some of the key characteristics and delve into how the best actually express them, but for now, you may want to think about how you would be viewed by your employees. How would you stack up against this list? We have our class participant’s rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 means “not at all” and 10 means “very accurately”) on how well each characteristic describes them as a manager/supervisor. You may want to imagine how your team members would evaluate you. This will give you an idea about what you should focus on to become more effective in your role as a leader.

Copyright © 2011 The RAD Group. All rights reserved.

Consequences of Not Speaking Up

Tue, 5 Apr 2011 17:15:17 -0500

What we learned upon completing a large-scale (3,000+ employees) study of safety interventions is that employees directly intervene in only about two of five unsafe actions and conditions that they observe in the workplace. The obvious concern is that a significant number of unsafe operations that could be stopped are not, which increases the likelihood of incidents and injuries; but this statistic is troubling for a less obvious reason - its cultural implication.
The influence of culture on safe and unsafe employee behavior is of such concern that regulatory bodies, like OSHA in the U.S. and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the U.K., have strongly encouraged organizations to foster “positive safety cultures” as part their overall safety management programs.
Employees are inclined to behave in a way that they perceive to be congruent (consistent) with the social values and expectations, or “norms,” that constitute their organization’s culture. These behavioral norms are largely established through social interaction and communication, and in particular through the ways that managers and supervisors instruct, reward and allocate their attention around employees. When supervisors and opinion leaders in organizations infrequently or inconsistently address unsafe behavior, it leads employees to believe that formal safety standards are not highly valued and employees are not genuinely expected to adhere to them. In short, the low frequency of safety interventions in the workplace contributes to a culture in which employees are not positively influenced to work safely.
These two implications – (1) that a significant number of unsafe operations are not being stopped, and (2) that safety culture is diminished – compound to create a problematic state of affairs. Employees are more likely to act unsafely in organizations with diminished safety cultures, yet their unsafe behavior is less likely to be stopped in those organizations.
(Look for the full-length article in the May/June 2011 edition of EHS Today.)
Copyright © 2011 The RAD Group. All rights reserved.

Complexity and Rationality

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:09:31 -0500

Why do employees decide to break the rules? Do it their way? Resist change? It doesn’t make any sense!
It can be frustrating, and often perplexing, when employees fail to adhere to company policies and procedures, especially when those policies and procedures are in their best interest. There is a useful way to think about this issue: What employees do makes sense...to them; but the complexity of work environments makes it hard to understand why it makes sense to them.
We live and work in complex environments. It helps to think of our environments as systems with overlapping and interacting components - including people, things, rules, values, etc. - which are, in turn, complex sub-systems. One of the principles of complex systems is that the “people” component tends to respond only to the limited information that they are presented with locally. We make decisions based on our knowledge of what makes sense at the local level, which is called “local rationality”.
The policies and procedures contained in the corporate manual are only influential if they are brought to bear on the daily lives of people in the workplace. If those policies and procedures only exist in the manual and are not made a part of the local workplace, then they don’t exist in reality and will not have an impact on performance. They will lack influence.
Companies have policies and procedures for a reason - to create good, reliable results; so it is the responsibility of supervisors to bring those policies and procedures to life in the workplace. By intentionally incorporating formal policies and procedures into the “local” work environments of employees - through conversation, feedback, modeling, etc. - supervisors make it “rational” to follow the rules.

Copyright © 2011 The RAD Group. All rights reserved.

Conflicting goals make room for performance failures

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:10:05 -0500

Most people do not set out to fail. On the contrary, most of us regularly attempt to succeed; but at times we do fail none-the-less. The role of a supervisor is to get results through the efforts of other people, so an important question for supervisors is, “Why does a specific performance failure occur?” There are a lot of reasons - knowledge, skill, motivation, etc. - and key among them is something called “goal conflict”.
We live in a complex work-world with multiple competing demands. We must be safe, fast, cheap and valuable all at the same time. It is humanly impossible to make all of these goals #1 at the same time, so we make cost-benefit tradeoffs and “choose” which objective is the most important at the time given the pressures of the environment/culture that we are in. I may choose to “hurry” because of time pressure, but in so doing sacrifice safety and quality.
As a supervisor I need to understand the drivers behind my employees’ performance failures before I can adequately help them become successful. What “tradeoffs” did the employee make that produced the failure? Did his ‘desire to please’ the supervisor outweigh his calculation of his own skill-level? Did her perceived ‘pressure to produce’ outweigh the thought to evaluate hazards associated with the task and take precautionary action?
Until we as supervisors take the time to evaluate the conflicting goals that drive employees’ performance, we will be less effective in reducing the opportunity for failure.

Copyright © 2011 The RAD Group. All rights reserved.