By: Shawn Galloway
Recorded: 17 August 2008
Welcome to Safety Culture Excellence®. Today’s topic: Global Implementation Metrics, BBS KPI’s, part 1 of 3. My name is Shawn Galloway, and I’m proud to be your host.
Greetings from Palatine, Illinois, located about 45 miles northeast of downtown Chicago. There is an old saying, “What gets measured gets managed.” Of course, my follow-up is, “If you don’t understand what you’re measuring, it’s still hard to improve.” Of all of our years and experience in auditing all of the processes and all the approaches to behavior-based safety out there, we found that the most difficult aspect is sustainability.
So, I’m really excited about this podcast. This is the beginning of a three-part series that focuses on behavior-based safety key performance indicators. I truly have a belief that projects don’t fail in the end; they fail in the beginning. So we have to set these things up targeting success. Of course, the ultimate goal here is to be able to do this right, not necessarily right now. So, to get to that point, I’ve put together a three-part podcast that I truly hope you’ll find beneficial.
This week we’ll start looking at the implementation metrics that we find to be valuable for global organizations that are rolling this out across multiple facilities. I also think, though, that you’ll find good value in this even if you are looking at this or you’re implementing at a single location. For it helps to focus on the areas of importance. Next week, we’ll pick it back up by focusing on common process metrics. And we’ll close out this series, two weeks from today, with a focus on balanced indicators for safety. Therefore, without any further delay, here we go.
“The next thing we’re going to talk about is the key performance indicators. What are the lagging indicators we usually look at? What do we usually measure as far as lagging indicators in behavior-based safety? Incident rate? At-risk behaviors? Let’s talk about - how do we measure the process itself - the performance of the process? So, what I first started looking at when I was putting all this together, is that I realized there are several global organizations here. And we even have a lot of divisional people that are going to be rolling this out to places all over the world. And these are our thoughts; these are the things that we’ve encouraged people to consider.
“What are some of the indicators that are important to know when you are implementing your process for the first time? Well, the first one could be just as easy as: has a cultural assessment occurred? If you have an internal consultant, have they assessed the culture? Has somebody gone out and done a cultural assessment at the site? Have they looked at it and said, ‘Well, first off, what’s the feasibility?’ But what will people support? Because you don’t want to force any ideas upon anyone.
“You have to look at it and say, ‘What will people support? What won’t they support?’ And, ‘What’s going to be their resistance to this type of idea?’ And try to figure out, ‘Well, can we can get the right parties together and allow them to define what will be valuable to the initiative?’ You can’t do that without talking to the culture and without having that assessment.
“So, were the findings favorable to implement? You could put all of this in a yes/no or maybe type boxes, but were the finding favorable? If no, has a plan for mediation been implemented? Have you created a plan to get you where you need to be? If there are some other things you have to do, whether it is traditional safety, relationship issues, or whatever you have to do, have you at least implemented that plan and begun that plan?
“By level - what was the level of support? Was it strong support at all levels of the organization? Was it average? And there’s different ways that you can categorize this. Has support and priority been communicated? Has this been communicated at the site leadership level that these things are going to be important? And, maybe it’s creating a communication plan or a charter of support from the leadership. Has somebody gone out there and said, ‘Yes, these are the things we want to do. And this is a priority for us, and it’s going to be important we knock this out.’
“Has somebody communicated the priority of this if the assessment was favorable to move forward? Because even if the assessment was favorable, we don’t want to just ambush and show back up and start implementing on something. We want to make sure the support mechanism is going to be there.
“The next question was, simply, ‘Has implementation begun?’ You could just have it as three different questions. I will get to the third one in a second, but, ‘Has a cultural assessment occurred?’ And the second one, ‘Has an implementation begun?’
“Has a process been customized to the location? Have they taken these ideas and customized it and made it their own? Has the steering committee been trained? Has the site accomplished a precaution or a behavioral Pareto analysis? Have they actually gotten together with their own incident data, and have you given this committee the information in order to customize the process? Has a focused checklist been developed? This will help you understand if this is something - somebody handed them a checklist or they bought a predesigned checklist. It will help you determine some of those indicators. Have all the management and supervisors been trained? Have people been trained in observation techniques?
“This is an important one, too. Has 100 percent of affected employees been briefed? It’s very critical that you want to brief everyone before you start these initiatives because, otherwise, people are going to feel as if they are being ambushed on it. Now, the reason I said ‘affected’ is because what if you are just starting out in one particular area of the facility, one department, or maybe amongst one shift or one group of employees? Have those people at least been briefed? We encourage that perhaps you brief the other people as well, though, because we don’t want sub-cultures to be created in the organization.
“But has the support and priority been communicated to all? Notice I have those in two different areas there. That’s very important that the leaders – as Steve said today that, ‘Culture change starts at the top.’ If we’re not focusing on the things that are important, and we’re not communicating those things that are important at the leadership level, it’s going to be very difficult for people to buy into those ideas.
“Did the site have some sort of kickoff event? This would be important if you’re implementing at several different locations. What did one site do? Has everyone decided to do a kickoff event? Here in Texas, the joke that we have is that, ‘If you are kicking it off, you have to have a barbeque.’ Maybe for lunch, you can have Mexican food. Regardless, has the site done some sort of kickoff activity? What percent of the employees can recite the precaution focus?
“You will see that becomes important as we’re sustaining the initiative. But, if we communicate something, or if we go out there and say, ‘Here’s our checklist. And there’s five things on it, three things, there’s seven things on this checklist.’ A month later, what percentage of them can immediately rattle off the things we’ve just communicated to them, or the things that we’ve just kicked off? That will help you to determine a baseline of, well, ‘Where are we, then?’ Again, that principle of navigation, ‘Where are we right now?’
“We identify that there are five critical things that people can do themselves that we want to try to at least encourage because they’re good ideas. What’s the knowledge level of those things right now? You can put that as an item on your checklist. We call it knowledge of precautions. Go out there and say - after you’ve done the observation or even before, whatever works best for you - measure. Do people know the knowledge of the precautions? Several of the sites in here have already experimented with this and had some pretty good feedback on it. Something that Terry and I started, I guess about a year ago now, was encouraging folks to put that on there.
“And the last thing: ‘Is an implementation complete?’ It could just be three things. Of course, you could go down in a little more detail, but has data analysis training occurred? If you put a process together, have we gotten back and have we analyzed the data? Has that training actually occurred out there at the site? Has continuous improvement auditing skills training occurred? We usually do this at about the six-month mark, but have these steps actually happened? Lastly, has the process received a one-year audit? If you’re training internal consultants or if you have people doing this at different sites, maybe have steering committee members go over and audit a sister facility site. There’s a lot of things you can consider here.”
Until next time, remember: “In safety, prevention trumps reaction.” For more information on Safety Culture Excellence® or if you have a topic to suggest please email us at podcast @ proactsafety.com.