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Employee Engagement

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. We have worked with numerous organizations over the years to re-create or re-energize their behavior-based safety (BBS) programs. Several years ago, a leading manufacturing company asked us to revamp their program. Despite early success, their process had devolved into a “pencil whipping” exercise with an overly long checklist that people didn’t want to fill out. There was also an absence of effective safety feedback following observations and insufficient follow-up with identified concerns (“black hole”). This is typical of most clients reaching out to us to improve their BBS program. We started fresh by discarding the lengthy behavioral

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Several years ago, we were asked to work with a leading manufacturing company to assess their human performance (HP) and safety culture practices. Although they had high executive safety commitment and numerous progressive HP programs, they wanted to level up their performance. We partnered with them to identify strengths to reinforce and gaps to address to help optimize their safety processes and culture. The first step in these improvement efforts involved the creation of a highly customized survey to assess specific safety culture and process safety efforts. Tailored interview and focus group questions were also created to get

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Create a poster campaign with small rewards to raise safety awareness in a fun, fresh way.  Safety initiatives that include employee participation help develop a stronger safety culture and increase operational performance. Strive for more than just compliance – make safety personal, so that people are using their better judgement to make safe decisions instead of just following orders. How do you make safety personal? One simple way is to use employees’ own words and images. Make posters! Giving employees the opportunity to create their own safety posters makes them more likely to care about the posters and the messages

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. For decades, organizational leaders have used incentives to try and motivate safety. The idea is that providing money for injury avoidance will get employees to “try harder” to stay safe. In reality, it simply encourages non-reporting which is why OSHA now frowns upon outcome-based incentives. Fortunately, most leaders using incentives have moved to process-based rewards. This brings up several important considerations: Proactive, process-based incentives are substantially better than those that are outcome-based. Process-based incentives, when used correctly, can be effective. However, they can be “pencil whipped” too The best “incentive” is genuine appreciation and ongoing recognition. Cautions with Process-Based Incentives Employees may

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Company leaders frequently use videos to showcase their support for ongoing safety efforts. These efforts are often well received but sometimes miss their mark. If the leader lacks empathy or seems out of touch these videos can actually do more harm than good. Here are some tips for creating executive safety videos that hit their mark: Drive your message home. Stay on message and keep reinforcing it. No other medium grabs attention like video, but you can quickly lose your audience if you lose message focus. Above all, keep it simple.Keep it short. Long videos put people to sleep.

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. In Part 1 of this blog, active steps were addressed to reinvigorate your behavioral safety program with BBS 2.0. This included transitioning from lengthy (often pencil whipped) checklists and quotas to a more robust program focused on: Conversations over cardsPeople over paperQuality over quantityHigh leadership and employee engagementFixing problemsAdvertising improvementsShowing appreciation for involvement Setting up BBS 2.0 involves shortening and redesigning your card to promote better safety conversations and to address identified problems, involving employees in process design to increase discretionary effort, simplifying how cards are managed and analyzed (more focus on SIF potential), and creating or rebooting

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