BEHAVIORAL ISSUES IN MANAGEMENT OF SAFETY
Author: Madan Mohan Tripathy

The Story from Panchatantra

While talking of Behavioural Issues in Management of Safety, I am reminded of a classic story of Panchatantra. This is the story of three fishes named Dirgha Sutri the planner, Pratyutpanna Mati, the cunning and Anaagata Bidhaataa, the careless. They overheard the discussion of some fishermen regarding fishing in the pond the next day. This gave a jolt to the three.

“ Brothers! The fishermen will fish tomorrow in the pond. Let us save ourselves by going to the adjacent pond through the channel connecting the two ponds well in advance”, said Dirgha Sutri.

“We are staying in this pond for quite long and never in the past was there any fishing here. Let us not be in panic. Let us watch and see. We can as well move out if the occasion demands”, retorted Pratyutpanna Mati.

Anaagata Bidhaata was the dame-care variety and he said, “ You are unnecessarily making a fuss. There is a lot of water in the pond. It will not be possible for them to fish. And in any case we can always save ourselves by moving to the lower level of water where fishing net cannot reach”.

Dirgha Sutri, not satisfied with the opinion of the other two, nevertheless, moved to the adjacent pond the same night. The fishing started next day as per plan. Anaagata Bidhaata who thought himself to be clever moved here and there, to the bottom of the pond and up and finally got exhausted and was caught in the fishing net. Pratyutpanna Mati, known for his presence of mind, pretended and acted like a dead fish and was easily caught by the fishermen. When the fishermen finally went to wash the fishing net and fishes in the adjacent pond, he slipped surreptitiously to water. Dirgha Sutri could see Anaagata Bidhaata caught in the net brooding over his folly. Pratyutpanna Mati was also unhappy because he could not save any of his family members.

Likewise, in organizations, there are three types of people –

i) Type I: People who know safety rules, follow them, plan in advance and save themselves from any dangerous occurrence by proactive action.

ii) Type II: Though conversant with safety rules and regulations, they do not bother to follow them and depend on their sole ingenuity and presence of mind to save themselves from danger. Such people even if escape a number of times unhurt because of their presence of mind, but obviously cannot depend on their presence of mind and luck everytime.

iii) Type III: People who are neither bothered about safety in work place nor about safety rules, leave aside following them. It is this third group who are accident-prone and suffer the most.

It is now widely accepted that 80 to 95% of all injuries are triggered by unsafe behaviour of employees whereas unsafe conditions account for less than 20%. While regulatory process has produced significant improvement in reducing unsafe conditions and provision of safety appliances, very little attention in the past has been paid to the role played by behaviour of people in the workplace in analyzing cause of injury and accidents. In this context, behavioral issues in management of safety occupy an important place. Though the importance of unsafe conditions should not be undermined, unsafe actions of people should not be allowed to play a second fiddle.




The iceberg of incidents:

Before proceeding any further, it is worth mentioning that organizations while evaluating their safety performance give too much reliance on the number of fatal accidents or the number of serious accidents or the number of reportable accidents under Factories Act. But such statistics are misleading and does not represent the true value of safety culture in an organisation. Whether the accident is fatal or a near miss – the difference is often a matter of luck. Taking into consideration the fatalities and serious accidents without considering the near-miss situations will be a jaundiced view. This is because for each serious accident, there are at least a dozen minor injuries, which go unreported and may be hundreds of potential unsafe actions. To build real safety culture, these unsafe actions finding place in the bottom of the “ Ice berg of incidents” diagrammatically represented here should


































attract our attention for eliminating all such unsafe actions. Then only we can tell proudly that the organisation possesses a true safety culture.




What is Safety Culture?

Safety Culture is a difficult concept and equally difficult to define. When we say that an organisation is having a good safety culture, it denotes that organisation where all the people belong to the first category, where safety is reflected in thoughts, expressions and deeds of all the people in the organisation starting from the lower level to the Chief Executive. Consciousness about safety permeates across the entire organisation. The employees have inner urge to practise safe-working methods, not by compulsion, coercion or threat, not by advice, not by counseling, but voluntarily. British Health & safety Commission has defined Safety Culture as the product of individual and group values, attitudes, competence and pattern of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of an organisation’s health and safety programmes.

But, when we talk of Safety Culture, it is not and cannot be built over night.

It is said,

It takes
* A minute to write a safety rule
* An hour to conduct a safety meeting
* A week to prepare a safety plan
* A month to put the plan into operation
* A year to win a safety award
* Some years to develop safety working habits
* A life time to inculcate a safety culture

From the above, it can be seen how difficult it is to develop a safety culture. But this is not impossible and can be built by employees, trade unions, management team and the Chief Executive in an organisation by working in unison.

Safety Culture is a term used to identify an overall approach to managing safety within an organisation. Rather than being a set of rules or procedures, safety culture is a way of life practised by all the people in the organisation. An example could be starting the shift in any plant with a briefing of the safety precautions to be followed. For organisations and individuals practising safety culture, always giving safety briefings and wearing Personal Protective Equipments become a second nature. In order to qualify as “ Safety Culture”, safety should be a part of our thought, words and action i.e. Safety in Mana, Bakya and Kaya.



What are the basic elements of Safety Culture?

To understand safety culture, we would use the ABC model of safety culture as given below.


















The basic elements of a Safety Culture are 5 C’s – Consciousness, Commitment, Compliance, Continuity and Credibility.

1) Consciousness: All individuals within the organisation are conscious and believe that they have a right to a safe and healthy workplace.
2) Commitment: Every individual in the organisation is committed not only to ensure his or her own safety and health but also has a commitment to protect the safety and health of others.
3) Compliance: Commitment without compliance is of no avail. Each individual complies with the safety procedures, rules, follows safety instructions and also ensures compliance by others.
4) Continuity: This is very important. The commitment and compliance is required to be continuous. Safety has no holiday. Opinions like “Let me not use safety helmet today, from tomorrow I will use it” are not conducive. It has to be a way of life.
5) Credibility: There has to be trust between management and employees in the matter of safety. Safety cannot thrive in an atmosphere of mistrust. Credibility requires both way communication between the management and the employees founded on mutual trust and there has to be a shared perception of the importance of safety.

Behavior:

Culture can be said to be the collective behaviour of a community of individuals. Culture has two important determinants. The outer layer of culture or the surface structure is the behavior, which is observable.

Action:

However, within the coat of this outer structure lies the inner structure or the core structure called Action, characterised by Awareness (or the Knowledge), Ability (or the Skill) and Attitude (or the mental state or the value or the beliefs and assumptions). This inner structure provides the logic, the reasoning, which guides the behaviour of a person.

Nobody likes to suffer injury. Yet, people sometimes behave in a manner that causes injury to themselves and others. What are the reasons for such behavior? The first is lack of Awareness or Knowledge. The second is lack of ability or skill and the third - the most important is the attitude.

It is common knowledge that attitude affects behaviour. If a person has positive attitude, odds are that he will exhibit safe behaviour. A negative attitude towards safety leads to conflict, stress and eventually an accident.

Attitude, Awareness and Ability shape our Actions, which give rise to behavior that is observable. Repeated behaviours become habit, which is translated into culture if behaviour and habit of majority people are similar.






Negative attitude is contagious:

An important point to consider is Negative Attitude is Contagious. A drop of poison on a pot full of nectar poisons the whole. An employee with a negative attitude not following safety rules can be the cause of injury not only for himself but also for others, even if others follow safety rules very meticulously.

It is a matter of concern that most of the times, the actions or in-actions of the Management is responsible for developing negative attitude. If in an organisation, an employee does not comply with the safety rules because of bad attitudes, and his colleagues do not see Management enforcing the rules, a wrong message is spread. Lack of action of the management against unsafe behaviour demonstrates that safety does not matter and other employees are tempted to bypass the rules or follow short cuts. A rule requiring the use of safety shoes and safety helmet can be quickly diminished if the shift-in-Charge walks around the plant without wearing them. A situation in which the Shift-in-Charge, supervisor or the fellow worker look the other way in order to get the job done, though subtle, is no less a destructive practice leading to undesirable safety culture. Even if “safety first” is the slogan of the organisation, safety is always preached and safety training classes are held for all, if the management encourages employees to bypass safety procedure citing production as the reason, message goes that safety is subservient to production and safety is important to the Company as long as production is not hampered.

Changing Perception of Safety:

Safety Culture and Production can go hand-in-hand. There is a myth that if we follow the safety procedure strictly, then the production will be hampered. People working in the production environment, harbour a feeling that focus on safety could detract employees from production. But this is not true. Though productivity, quality and cost are the fundamental business requirements, safety is no less important. Safety without production or quality will ruin the business. Actions for attaining quality production goals without safety is likely to kill someone or damage the equipment or machinery which in turn will hamper production and would prove more costly for the business. Safety culture is, as such, characterised by behaviors, which focus on the said quality, production at reduced cost, simultaneously ensuring safety for every one.

Day before yesterday Yesterday Today & tomorrow
1. Production2. Costs3. QualitySafety issues following an accident (corrective) 1. Safety (a priority)2. Production3. Quality4. Customers SafetyIntegrated into all actionsCostsQualityReliabilityCustomers
(Authority : IISI Committee on Human Resources)




The Root Cause:

When someone is behaving in an unsafe manner, he often has a “ supposedly justified” reason for it. A key aspect of behavioural approach to safety is to investigate the real reason why a person behaves in the manner he does.

The root cause analysis is very important because of the applicability of Pareto principle in the case of accidents, which states that 80% of the accident are caused by only 20% of the causes.

Research studies indicate that there are two kinds of failures that resulted in accidents – active failures and latent failures. All accidents are triggered by the active failures that originated from latent failures. Though active failures are known easily, latent failures need an in-depth study. Latent failures are the root causes and active failures are symptoms. Particular active error tends to be unique to a specific situation. But, latent conditions, which are the root causes, if undiscovered and uncorrected, can contribute to a number of different accidents. But, we all have a natural tendency to blame the person who triggers the accident (the active error) without going to the root.

How to build a safety culture?

Just making a catchy phrase like “ Safety First” and making banners on such catchy phrases is not enough for building a safety culture. Claiming safety is most important but rewarding behaviours and actions, providing short-term gains at the cost of safety is contrary to a safety culture. For Example: allowing a unit or a machine to run outside operating limits so as not to loss production or postpone repairs in the interest of production at the cost of equipment safety are not conducive to safety culture.

As a first step towards building a safety culture, it is necessary to understand where we stand. Then we must define the kind of culture we want for ourselves and find out the gaps, which should be filled in for obtaining the desired safety culture. Cultivating a safety culture is equivalent to developing a garden, which basically consists of three activities:

i) Nourish what re-enforces
ii) Weed out what is contrary
iii) Implant what is missing

Assessment:

Evaluation of safety culture in the organisation is not an easy job. Though there are a number of methods available, the behavioural methods generally centre on the perceptions and opinions of the employees, supervisors, middle management and senior management personnel and of course in some cases that of contractors and contract labour. Such surveys are generally carried out by interview method or questionnaire method. Whatever may be the method used, the survey must be done protecting the anonymity of the respondents and while making a survey, we should be prepared for not so palatable answers.
The results of the survey are not very difficult to predict. In most cases, there will be a difference between the safety policy and action. Further there is also likely to be a big gap in the safety message and philosophy as understood by the senior management, middle management personnel, supervisors and the workers. Whatever may be the method of survey and the gap in perception, the aim is to identify all those points that can be used to help gradually change the organisational culture and the perceptions of the employees about the importance and value of safety.

For the same, a sequence of steps are suggested below:

i) Awareness:
Developing awareness of employees regarding safety through safety induction, communications, safety posters, warning signs, safety handouts etc. is the first step. While developing awareness, cost of safety should not be lost sight of. Every accident results in cost both direct as well as indirect. The direct cost involves medical expenses, compensation to injured, injury leave etc., whereas indirect cost includes time off from work, loss of productivity, cost of wages of others, the loss of time of supervisors and managerial personnel, the damage to properties, administrative cost etc. Whereas, direct cost like medical expenses which are tangible constitute only 20 to 30% of the total costs, indirect intangible costs amount to 70 to 80%.

ii) Corrective action and change: Corrective action and change is the most difficult step of the total process. In this step investigations of not only accidents but also near-miss situations should be carried out. After the symptoms are determined, root causes in each and every case should be found out to be attacked for corrective action. Symptoms are the apparent action or condition available at the place of accident, whereas the root causes are the reasons for the existence of such symptoms. If only symptoms are corrected and root causes are left out, accidents shall continue to occur. Some general examples of root causes are, insufficient employee training, lack of accountability, inadequate safety policy and procedures, ineffective employee motivations, poor maintenance of equipments etc. The investigation should encompass the three production factors involved in all operations i.e. Equipment, Materials and People. Questions like - Is there a standard operating practice? Was the equipment used properly? Was the right equipment selected? Was equipment maintained properly as per standard maintenance practice? Was proper material handling procedures used for handling materials? Was there exposure of any hazardous materials? Were competent employees assigned the job? Were the employees trained in handling the material or the equipment? Were the employees motivated? etc. can give insight into the symptoms and root causes of the problem? Only investigating the unsafe behaviour is of no good and accomplishes nothing unless corrective action is taken to change the behaviour. Making the change in behaviour consistent and permanent is the real need. For the same, identification of the behaviour required to be changed and the benefits of the change need to be explained to the people. The employees should be made accountable for the change and there should not be a lapse of time between the recognition and implementation of the change. The change can be sustained by monitoring and codifying the results of the change.

iii) Education: Employee training and education is an essential element of changing behaviour for developing and sustaining a safety culture. How can we expect an employee to report hazards unless he knows what they are? How can we expect an employee to follow safety rules unless he knows what are those rules? How can we expect an employee to use safety appliances unless he is told what are the safety appliances required for the job? In general, an useful training sequence involves preparing the worker (attitude), training on-the-job (knowledge), involving the employee in carrying out the job (skill) and follow up (accountability). Training is an ungoing process. It never ends. When new equipment or new process are added, all the employees concerned with it should be given the training. In the mater of safety, repeated briefings are not considered bad and as a matter of fact are desirable. Refresher training in some cases may be necessary.

iv) Accountability: Accountability is the art of motivation. Employees are motivated to do their best when they know that their performances are measured. There is an old adage- “What gets measured is what gets done”. Assigning responsibility without assigning accountability is the greatest failing of safety management. If people can be made responsible and accountable for production, for quality, for cost, there is absolutely no reason why cannot they be made accountable for safety?

v) Recognition: Recognition can be accorded through observation, inspection, safety committees etc. Recognition motivates employees for safe behaviour. Employees can be rewarded for making safety suggestions and implementing job safety improvement methods. However, the incentive or award should have less monetary value but more symbolic value, something, which can be remembered. Recognition in form of awards or otherwise should be based on what was done throughout a certain time period to reach a target rather than just reaching a target, in order to remove the number mania from the mindset of people. Mind it-the focus should be on the journey rather than the destination. That is the true approach to safety culture. To the extent possible recognition should be given based on team efforts to promote teamwork or synergy. But, individual recognition is recommended in case of innovative suggestions and solutions or exceptional efforts as creativity mostly comes from an individual. While rewarding safe behaviour, unsafe behaviour should not be lost sight of.

vi) Audit & Feedback: This is obviously the last step, which indicates whether the wheel moves in the right direction? There is no magic cure for lack of safety. There is no capsule for developing a safety culture. Everything is shear hard work and commitment from everyone, beginning from Chief Executive right down to all lowest level employees, including the part-time workers or contractor-labour.

For safety culture to be cultivated and sustained, while support and leadership should come from top, involvement and commitment should start from the bottom whereas mutual trust and goodwill should act as the lubricant for success.

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(The author Madan Mohan Tripathy is working as Dy General Manager, HR in Rallis India Limited, a TATA Enterprise in its Head Office in Mumbai, India. He is having rich experience of more than 25 years in HR & IR in both Public Sector & Private Sector of repute. Articles on different facets of Management written by him are published in reputed Management Journals. He can be contacted at mm_tripathy@sify.com or mm_tripathy@rediffmail.com)
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(The author Madan Mohan Tripathy is working as Dy General Manager, HR in Rallis India Limited, a TATA Enterprise in its Head Office in Mumbai, India. He is having rich experience of more than 25 years in HR & IR in both Public Sector & Private Sector of repute. Articles on different facets of Management written by him are published in reputed Management Journals. He can be contacted at mm_tripathy@sify.com or mm_tripathy@rediffmail.com)

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