By: Shawn Galloway
Recorded: 24 August 2008
Welcome to Safety Culture Excellence®. Today’s topic: Common Process Metrics, BBS KPI’s, part 2 of 3. My name is Shawn Galloway, and I’m proud to be your host.
Hello, everyone, from Bury, England, which is known for its once-famous resident, Sir Robert Peel, who was the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the founder of the metropolitan police service, which is where the affectionate nickname “Bobbies” came from.
This week, I’ll be focusing on some of the most common process metrics that we encourage companies to consider when they’re implementing or sustaining behavior-based safety processes. As this is part two of three of a podcast series, I please encourage you to go back and listen to part one of last week’s topic titled “Global Implementation Metrics” before moving forward, as I assure you you’ll miss some very valuable information. Next week, we’ll close out this particular series focusing on balanced indicators for safety. So, with that being said, here we go.
“There are some standard ones we see most companies measuring. The first one is the percentage of target number of people observed per month. That is an interesting one. The average measurement that we see here when we’re working with sites is, ‘What’s the target number of observations?’ Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily the target number of observations; the goal is the target number of people observed. That is how you develop your baseline.
“If you have 100 people, you want to get 100 people observed. Now, if every time you do an observation, you can observe and give feedback to two people, it’s only going to take you 50 observations to reach that goal. If you are doing one on one, then it’s going to take you 100. The goal is actually target number of people observed per month. What’s the percentage participation of observers in the process? If you have trained ten people, are all ten of them participating? Then you have to define what participation actually looks like. What’s the percentage of participation of the observers that have been trained?
“What’s the attendance of committee members at the monthly meetings? This will start helping you understand the barriers. Maybe they are set up for a time that doesn’t allow for 100 percent of them to get together. The thing that we always joke about is, ‘You can’t call a committee a group of folks that can’t ever all get together.’ Just putting people in a room doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a committee, but a group of people that can’t always all get together at least somewhat frequently, you can’t really call them a committee.
“The fourth thing that we see many people measuring against is the number of support scorecards completed by managers or supervisors. Sometimes you have to develop a system to actually go out there and measure the support of the managers and supervisors. Sometimes employees can measure those things. Sometimes managers can measure the support of supervisors. They can measure themselves. You can develop a peer observation type of approach separate from what the employees are doing at the management or the supervisory level.
“But, you have to look at it and say, ‘We want support to be there.’ What gets measured, gets managed, so we want to at least go out there and say, ‘Can we measure the support of the management and the leadership of supervisors at this site?’ What are the results of any perception surveys completed during the observations? There are some questions you can ask, if you’ve decided to integrate into that, on any perception survey that are done year after year. We see a lot of sites that try and look at validation just on perception surveys. That will tell you a little bit, but it doesn’t give you the big picture.
“And, of course, what is the rate of refusal? I don’t know how many of your guys are actually tracking that, but what some sites will do is just write on the checklist, kind of refuse, and they’ll enter that in as a blank observation. What is the rate of refusal? Are we getting past some of the cave people that are out there? You have to look at it and say, ‘What is the rate of refusal?’ That is something that we usually encourage you to look at because, if you have a rate of 5 percent or only a few people, are we reaching those people or are they really true cave people?
“So, what’s the quality of concern insight? I say that because it is different from data. Anytime that you have a numbers goal and the quantity, we are encouraging you to at least have a quality goal there as well. Maybe shoot for a percentage of good observations that come in there. Maybe it’s the person that enters in the data can define what the quality of concern data looks like, or the insight. But is it data or is it insight? That’s what we want to focus on is trying to really get insight when there’s concerns that we’re seeing, not just data or something that doesn’t make sense.
“But, maybe, set a quality goal. Look at it and say, ‘What percentage of the observations that were turned in have some sort of concern on them? What was the quality?’ So, you first have to define, ‘What does quality observations look like?’ and then measure where we are right now. Then, set a goal to try to improve that quality, whether it is coaching the observers or showing them what great quality observations really look like. I mentioned this earlier – you’ve got to measure support at all levels of the organization. Maybe you could just measure that by the rate of refusal, or you could measure it by the management and their support scorecards.
“But, also, we really want you to be looking at trust levels. Is trust increasing at this site? Is it decreasing? Is it staying the same? Are we doing things to continue to build the important relationships there? Maybe it’s even the definition of safety. We see some sites that are measuring how we actually define safety. We communicate that. Is that changing people’s perception, and is that changing their own definition of safety? Safety can’t just mean, ‘Not having an accident.’
“Maybe it is even action plans. We see a lot of sites doing this - the number of action plans created and the number of action plans closed out. Then, of course, the trends in percent-safe as it relates to those action plans. If there is an action plan that impacts a certain shift or a certain line in the facility, how does that action plan then impact the percent-safe? And, of course, knowledge of precautions. We have to go out there and measure if these things are really important, where are the breakdowns? Where the barriers in the communications channels we put in place?
“If you do this process, you set it up, and you continue to look for new value in this. You can identify all of those trends and respond to them before they turn into accidents. That’s where we really start to work towards that excellence level in safety.
“But, also, I mentioned yesterday that at the average site that we go out there and audit, a good majority of the people can’t really point to the successes that the initiatives had. A lot of times the only people that know what the successes were, were the folks that are on the committee. Share those things. Maybe it’s a matter that they don’t want to get up on stage. That’s fine - have someone else at the facility share those things. Put indicators somewhere, use newsletters. But somehow let people know what this thing has been successful in accomplishing. We use a list of things that we audit sites on, and there are some basic key performance indicators that we look at at a site that I am going to encourage every single one of you to track on your own, month after month.”
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.