By: Shawn Galloway
Recorded: 31 August 2008
Welcome to Safety Culture Excellence®. Today’s topic: Balanced Indicators for Safety, BBS KPI’s, part 3 of 3. My name is Shawn Galloway, and I’m proud to be your host.
Hello, everyone, from Manchester, England. In this week, I’ll close out a three-part series. As I’ve mentioned before, if you have not yet heard the previous parts of this series, I encourage you to go back and listen to that first before moving forward. In this week, I’ll close out discussing the importance of identifying both some balanced and key indicators that need to be communicated back to people. I have some plans in the future to deliver some podcasts that focus specifically on creating, customizing, and carrying out balanced scorecards for safety. As they are cued up for future podcasts, please let me know if you’d like for me to move that up and deliver that sooner, as the feedback I receive on this week after week helps set the direction. Here we go!
“More and more sites are going towards some sort of a red, yellow, green scorecard. But however you’re measuring it – a lot of the oil companies that are here, a lot of your clients and contracts, they use a lot of these red, yellow, green scorecards. Some sort of system to give people information that helps them quickly identify, ‘What do we need to focus on?’ without all of the information that we try to throw at people.
“One of the things that I talked about in the communication talk is that the average employee out there can only remember, based on all the studies, can only remember about three incidents where they remember all the data. Two to three incidents is what the average worker can remember when you ask them. They don’t see the big picture because they don’t get all the big picture information. So, we don’t want to overload them with more information. That was what came out of the BP, Texas City incident. It wasn’t that BP wasn’t doing enough things in safety; there was some specific things they really should have been focusing on. They were doing a lot of activity in safety, but they were missing the mark.
“We are not encouraging you to create more, more, and more communication and more, more, and more indicators to manage. We are just saying, ‘What are the most important ones to your site?’ And it’s going to be different, company to company. There is no set one. There is no magic ingredient, thus there’s no magic formula. I know several sites in here, which I often talk to, that are measuring some things and neither one of them are measuring the exact same things. Whatever is going to work best for you to give you the information that is going to help you improve your site. But, you’ve got to measure those things.
“Measuring to improve it isn’t enough. You’ve got to understand what you are measuring and you got to look at it and say, ‘Well, what does that measurement really mean? What is it really telling us?’ And that’s the insight that comes from this measurement. The world is going more towards balance indicators in safety, more towards performance dashboards. And I kind of like this because, if you could do something like that, that quickly tell you where you are, where are the critical areas.
“A lot of the race cars, what they do, is they only have a couple of indicators in the racecars. And what they do is put the perfect measurement right at 12 o’clock. So, the racecar drivers, as they are going hundreds of miles an hour, don’t have to quickly look at their gauges to figure out, ‘Okay, what do I need to do to improve my position in the race?’ They can quickly look down and see, ‘Am I a little to the left or a little to the right?’ And that’s what we are trying to highlight here. There’s a lot of performance dashboards that are starting to come out.
“This is more of a message for your corporate folks, I realize that. But just consider, ‘What are the key measurements, the key pieces of information, that will be helpful for our people to improve their own safety?’ Whether it’s the percent-safe, whether it’s the target number of people observed, whether it’s the knowledge of precautions. Many of the sites that we’ve started working with are already seeing a correlation between the knowledge level and the percent-safe. The ones that they remember the least also sometimes are the ones that have the lowest percent-safe. So, communication is so important in safety and we are not saying, ‘Just do more communication.’ What we’re saying is, ‘Just focus on the most important things there.’”
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.