Working Safe

How to Help People Actively Care for Health and Safety, Second Edition

E. Scott Geller

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351990448
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Written by world-renowned health and safety researcher E. Scott Geller, Working Safe: How to Help People Actively Care for Health and Safety, Second Edition presents science-based and practical approaches to improving attitudes and behavior for achieving an injury-free work environment. This book teaches proactive applications of behavior-based psychology for improving health and safety. Relevant theory and principles are clearly explained and practical step-by-step procedures are detailed. Dr. Geller's anecdotal and non-academic writing style makes the book fun and easy to read.This research-based text is completely updated and expanded from the 1996 edition. It includes three new chapters: one on behavioral safety analysis, another on intervening with supportive conversation, and the third on how to promote high performance teamwork. Thus, this second edition continues to provide the practical advice safety leaders rely on.Working Safe: How to Help People Actively Care for Health and Safety supplies the research and theory needed to customize effective behavior-based procedures and tools in your workplace. The information and examples provide health and safety professionals with behavioral science methods capable of enhancing safety awareness, reducing at-risk behavior, and facilitating ongoing participation in safety-related activities.

part one

Orientation and alignment

chapter one

Choosing the right approach

The basic purpose of this book is outlined in this chapter: to explore the human dynamics of occupational health and safety, and to show how they can be managed to significantly improve safety performance. The principles and practical procedures you will learn are based on neither common sense nor intuition, but rather on reliable scientific investigation. Many recommendations seem counter to “pop psychology” and traditional approaches to safety. So keep an open mind while you read about the psychology of safety.

“Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.” — Peter Senge

Safety professionals, team leaders, and concerned workers today scramble to find the “best” safety approach for their workplace. Typically, whatever offers the cheapest “quick fix” sells. This is not surprising, given the “lean and mean” atmosphere of the times. Programs that offer the most benefit with least effort sound best, but will they really work to improve safety over the long term?

This text will help you ask the right questions to determine whether a particular approach to safety improvement will work. More importantly, this text describes the basic ingredients needed to improve organizational and community safety. In fact, you will find sufficient information to improve any safety process. Learning the principles and procedures described here will enable you to make a beneficial, long-term difference in the safety and health of your workplace, home, and community. The information is relevant for most other performance domains, from increasing the quantity and quality of productivity in the workplace to improving quality of life in homes, neighborhoods, and throughout entire communities.

Selecting the best approach

With so many different approaches to safety improvement available, how can we select the best? My first thought is to ask, “What does the research indicate?” In other words, are there objective data available from program comparisons to shed light on our dilemma? Unfortunately, there are few systematic comparisons of alternative safety interventions. However, this does not stop consultants from showing us impressive results regarding the success of their approaches. Nor does it prevent them from implying (or boldly stating) that we can obtain similar fantastic results by simply following their patented “steps to success.”

Figure 1.1 Some research is not worth considering.

Keep in mind this marketing information usually comes from selected client case studies. Very few of these “success stories” were collected objectively and reliably enough to meet the rigorous standards of a professional research journal. When consultants try to sell you an approach to safety with this kind of data, ask them if they have published their results in a peer-reviewed journal. If they can show you a published research report of their impressive results or a professional presentation of a program very similar to theirs, then give their approach special consideration in your selection process. The validity and applicability of even published research varies dramatically, however. Figure 1.1 depicts the low end of research quality.

Most of the published research on safety improvement systematically evaluates whether a particular program worked in a particular situation, but it does not compare one approach with another. In other words, this research tells us whether a certain strategy is better than nothing, but offers no information regarding the relative impact of two or more different strategies on safety improvement. Such research has limited usefulness when selecting among different approaches.

An exception can be found in a review article in Safety Science, where Stephen Guastello (1993) summarized systematically the evaluation data from 53 different research reports of safety programs. Guastello provided rare and useful information for deciding how to improve safety. You can assume the evaluations were both reliable and valid, because each report appeared in a scientific peer-reviewed journal. All of the studies selected for his summary were conducted in a workplace setting since 1977, and each study evaluated program impact with outcome data (including number and severity of injuries).

From my reading of Guastello’s article, I believe it is safe to say the behavior-based and comprehensive ergonomics approaches lead the field. Personnel selection, the most popular method (26 studies targeted a total of 19,177 employees), is among the least effective. Here are brief descriptions of these approaches to reduce workplace injuries, ranked according to their effectiveness.

Behavior-based programs

Programs in this category consisted of employee training regarding particular safe and at-risk behaviors, systematic observation and recording of the targeted behaviors, and feedback to workers regarding the frequency or percentage of safe vs. at-risk behavior. Some of these programs included goal setting and/or incentives to encourage the observation and feedback process.

Comprehensive ergonomics

The ergonomics (or human factors) approach to safety refers essentially to any adjustment of working conditions or equipment in order to reduce the frequency or probability of an environmental hazard or at-risk behavior. An essential ingredient in these programs was a diagnostic survey or environmental audit by employees which led to specific recommendations for eliminating hazards that put employees at risk or promoted at-risk behaviors.

Engineering changes

This category includes the introduction of robots or the comprehensive redesign of facilities to eliminate certain at-risk behaviors. It is noted, however, that the robotic interventions introduced the potential for new types of workplace injuries, like a robot catching an operator in its work envelope and impaling him or her against a structure. Thus, robotic innovations usually require additional engineering intervention such as equipment guards, emergency kill switches, radar-type sensors, and workplace redesign to prevent injury from robots. Behavioral training, observation, and feedback (as detailed in Part 4 of this book) are also needed following engineering redesign.

Group problem solving

For this approach, operations personnel met voluntarily to discuss safety issues and problems, and to develop action plans for safety improvement. This approach is analogous to quality circles where employees who perform similar types of work meet regularly to solve problems of product quality, productivity, and cost.

Government action (in Finland)

In Finland, two government agencies responsible for labor production target the most problematic occupational groups and implement certain action strategies.

These include:

1. Disseminating information to work supervisors regarding the causes of workplace injuries and methods to reduce them

2. Setting standards for safe machine repair and use and

3. Conducting periodic work site inspections

Management audits

For the programs in this category, designated managers were trained to administer a standard International Safety Rating System (ISRS). This system evaluates workplaces based on 20 components of industrial safety. These include leadership and administration, management training, planned inspections, task and procedures analysis, task observations, emergency preparedness, organizational rules, accident analysis, employee training, personal protective equipment, health control, program evaluation, engineering controls, and off-the-job safety.

Managers conduct the comprehensive audits annually to develop improvement strategies for the next year. Specially certified ISRS personnel visit target sites and recognize a plant with up to five “stars” for exemplary safety performance.

Stress management

These programs taught employees how to cope with stressors or sources of work stress. Exercise was often a key action strategy promoted as a way to prevent stress-related injuries in physically demanding jobs. I discuss the topic of stress as it relates to injury prevention in Chapter 6.

Poster campaigns

The two published studies in this category evaluated the accident reduction impact of posting signs that urged workers at a shipyard to avoid certain at-risk behaviors and to follow certain safe behaviors. Most signs were posted at relevant locations and gave specific behavioral instructions like “Take material for only one workday,” “Gather hoses immediately after use,” “Wear your safety helmet,” and “Check railing and platform couplings (on scaffolds).”

For one study, safety personnel at the shipyard gave work teams weekly feedback regarding compliance with sign instructions. In the other study, environmental audits, group discussions, and structured interviews were used to develop the poster messages. Thus, it’s possible that factors other than the posters themselves contributed to the moderate short-term impact of this intervention approach. All of these factors are covered in this book, including ways to maximize the beneficial effects of safety signs (in Chapter 10).

Personnel selection

This popular but ineffective approach to injury prevention is based on the intuitive notion of “accident proneness.” The strategy is to identify aspects of accident proneness among job applicants and then screen out people with critical levels of certain characteristics.

Although measuring and screening for accident proneness sounds like a “quick fix” approach to injury prevention, this method has several problems you will readily realize as you read more in this book about the psychology of safety. Briefly, this technique has not worked reliably to prevent workplace injuries because:

1. The instruments or procedures available to measure the proneness characteristics are unreliable or invalid.

2. The characteristics do not carry across settings, so a person might show them at home but not at work or vice versa.

3. A person with a higher desire to take risks (such as a sensation seeker) might be less inclined to take appropriate precautions (like using personal protective equipment) to avoid potential injury.

“Near-miss” reporting

This approach involved increased reporting and investigation of incidents that did not result in an injury but certainly could have under slightly different circumstances. One program in this category increased the number of corrective suggestions generated but did not reduce injury rate. The other scientific publication in this category reported a 56 percent reduction in injury severity as a result of increased reporting of near hits,^* but the overall number of injuries did not change.

The critical human element

Every safety approach described above requires that you consider the human element or the psychology of safety. Indeed, the most successful approaches, behavior-based safety and comprehensive ergonomics, directly address the human aspects of safety. The bottom line is illustrated in Figure 1.2. The three employees here are looking at a contributing factor in almost every injury — the human factor. Thus, any safety intervention that improves the safety-related behaviors of workers will pr...