By: Shawn Galloway
Recorded: 03 August 2008
Welcome to Safety Culture Excellence®. Today’s topic: The Observation Process Radar Map. My name is Shawn Galloway, and I’m proud to be your host.
Hello from Paris, France. In this week’s podcast, I’ll present an idea essentially the way that I tend to look at observation data. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the processes that we audit, not enough are focusing on the data and responding to the data, and most importantly, communicating the findings from the data. Even those who do respond to the data and do an excellent job, there’s further opportunities for improvement. Peter Drucker once said, “Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it.” Essentially, what we’ve done today doesn’t necessarily mean we’re gonna be successful in doing the same tomorrow. We have to be looking for new ways to provide value, and safety for those that we work with.
I like to think of how you should be responding to your observation data kind of like a radar map. Where are the concentrated blips on your radar map? Not enough sites out there are really thoroughly using the trends that your observation data will automatically tell you. You need to be looking at this on a monthly basis, and if you already have – or if you’re putting a process in place, and if there’s enough incident data to determine this, you can see these same trends when you’re first starting the process.
And you can look at the incident trends, and compare that to the observation trends and see, “Do we see a correlation there?” Do we see that there really is a certain time of the day, or we see a certain day of the week? Or what about looking at the tenure of employee? All of these things – Don’t just go out and measure it if the culture doesn’t support it, but look at the cards, look at your checklists and say, “What variables do we have on here?” And look at it and say that that means we’re going to have some risk pools. Which risk pools are a little bit deeper than others? And that’s what we want to look at and say, “Maybe it’s as we’re cross training employees, maybe it’s their experience level on that task. Maybe that presents some issues.”
Again, we want to identify these things before we see them in accident data. Most of the things that are on there, the average site has the majority of those items in their incident investigation. The data’s already there for you. I encourage you to go back to your site, and look and see what trends you see in your incident data. But whatever trends that you also have in your observation data, try to correlate those things because we want to continue to identify them before they turn into accident trends.
I said this earlier, that what got you here won’t get you there. The things that led to your success today are going to become obsolete. Doing the same thing next year doesn’t necessarily mean – The first year we had a 45 percent reduction on accidents. That doesn’t necessarily mean that if we do the exact same thing next year, we’re going to have another 45 percent reduction in accidents. Whatever your reduction rate is, you have to continue to learn from what you’re finding out there; learn from other sites, and that’s why I’m encouraging you to network with other people because they’ve experienced other challenges.
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.
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Duration: 4 minutes