What Are Your Workers Doing When Nobody's Looking?

What Are Your Workers Doing When Nobody's Looking?

A culture that promotes employee-driven safety changes safety attitudes and performance. 

 When workers are taking risks when nobody's looking, there's a problem with the safety culture—one that can be cured with a shift to an employee-driven safety system.

The goal of an employee-driven safety is to change employees' perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and values about safety so that their behavior changes as well.

Behavior change is fundamental to the employee-driven safety process. When employees are driving safety, you don't have to worry what they're doing when you're not looking because their co-workers will be looking and watching for unsafe behavior.

Behavior vs. Engineering Controls

Does this mean that employee-driven safety, with its emphasis on behavior, runs contrary to the hierarchy of controls?

No, it does not suggest that behaviors are more important than engineering controls. Organizations have to strive to engineer hazards out and eliminate dangers for employees. But, as you know, it isn't possible to eliminate all hazards. Employees are always going to have to make choices. There will always be something that people can do wrong.

Engineering controls still come first, but controls such as rules and procedures that address behaviors are also extremely important.

Remember that workers may not fully appreciate the risks of the work that they do because it is so familiar to them and that is reflected in their behavior. They may believe that they understand the job well and that they have everything under control. But sometimes we overrate risks that we think are not in our control and underrate risks we're familiar with—and that's dangerous.

Antecedents and Consequences

Employee-driven safety systems incorporate some aspects of behavior-based safety. One important concept from behavior-based safety is that we make choices about our behavior based on two things:

• Antecedents, which are background beliefs that set up our beliefs about safety
• Consequences, whether positive or negative

For example, why does someone not wear gloves when handling a toxic solvent? Look at antecedents and consequences:

Antecedents might include:

• Low risk perception
• No training
• No one wears gloves
• No one gets hurt
• Not worried about long-term cancer risk
• Gloves not readily available
• Gloves uncomfortable or not convenient

Negative consequences might include:

Injury/illness

Risk of reprimand (but if that never occurs it won't convince them to wear gloves)

Positive consequences might include:

• Injury/illness avoidance
• Avoiding discipline for noncompliance
• Recognition for wearing gloves, prompting conformity on the part of those who aren't wearing gloves