Opening the health and safety dialogue

For more than 15 years, we have advocated ‘Behavioural Safety’ as a winning health and safety strategy at Aycliffe, which has contributed to a significant increase in the mean time between recordable injuries and lost time accidents.

 

The programme known as PAWS (Prevent Accidents With Safe behaviour) was named by fork lift driver David Kay as part of a competition in 1999 and he still works at the site today. It helps to eliminate the perception that health and safety is exclusively the domain of health and safety professionals.

 

We employ around 320 people here, and our behavioural safety programme provides eyes and ears to prevent anything going wrong.As with most manufacturing facilities there are a range of health and safety risks and hazards to people across our workforce. These can be anything from moving machinery, electrical hazards, manual handling activities, working at height, vehicle movements, small hand tools and housekeeping. By implementing a range of controls we can try and eliminate and reduce some of these risks. However, this is then reliant on people being competent and trained to do the right thing at the right time, and loss of concentration is sometimes inevitable. We therefore need to look at a way to ensure that health and safety is approached proactively, helping to counteract human factors due to individual lapses before a potential accident.

The main element of the programme is based on observation and feedback. Workers are trained to  observe their colleagues either demonstrating safe or unsafe behaviour whilst carrying out tasks;  they then follow up this observation by opening up dialogue with them. If they are deviating from a safe working practice they would ask why they are choosing to work that way and what is the worst thing that could happen if it was to go wrong. Most of the time this is due to a lapse in concentration, so the trained observer would help them to visualise the consequences of something going wrong. For example, if a worker was mixing chemicals and not wearing safety goggles they could be blinded and this could lead into further discussion around how it could impact family and friends; this is often referred to as ‘anticipatory regret’. This way we are trying to get away from the ‘it won’t happen to me’ attitude. Alternatively, if an employee is working safely then the observer would reinforce this and encourage them to get recommitment. In today’s society we always get told what is wrong and we find that positive reinforcement of the safe behaviour is received well by our workforce.

The initial research was carried out with Loughborough University in 1997 and as a result of our findings we introduced a safety critical list-based behavioural programme in 1998, the first 3M site to use this programme. We ran an initial pilot in the warehouse, which at the time was one of the most hazardous areas on site. 

Warehouse personnel generated a list of critical safety behaviours and on a weekly basis would tour the warehouse and record if these critical behaviours were being conformed to or not  Then between 1999 and 2000 this list based behavioural programe was rolled out across the site with mixed success.

Following this, we contacted Loughborough University again to carry out a gap analysis on our list-based programe, which identified gaps. A plan was then developed to bridge the gaps and reinvigorate the PAWS programe.  In 2001 the PAWS one-to-one behavioural programe was launced which included the establishment of a PAWS charter, PAWS one-to-one training and workshops, which were completed for the whole of the site over the next two years. It is this one-to-one behavioural based safety programe which is being used at Aycliffe today and in 2013 the trained observers recorded more than 6,600 safety dialogues.

Behavioural safety can be exercised in a number of ways, but we prefer this interpretation as it focuses on intervention and dialogue and this is what behavioural safety is all about. Some programmes only record the positive observations or just the unsafe practices without any dialogue, but only through thought-provoking conversation can you change the attitudes and values of an individual.

Since 2002 we have seen a consistent improvement in safety performance with an increased mean time between recordable injuries reported under Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).  To date, the site has celebrated several safety miletsones where a five year period without a Lost Time Accident (LTA)  was acheived in 2009 and more recently, the site celebrated three years LTA free in July 2014.

The site actively recognises key safety milestones and previously this has invloved family social events and Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) commemorative clothing. 

Trained people commit to at least one observation per month. Supervisors have a higher target, for example, four for team leaders and six for managers. This is then recorded on a database and translated on to scorecards to provide visibility of who has recorded what, allowing for additional training or mentoring needs to be identified. The database is also used to generate area specific PAWS reports and to identify trends.

One of the  key challenges is to keep the programme fresh for employees and resell the story in a different way. The average length of service at Aycliffe is 19 years so people can become complacent due to the  long periods between accidents – people see the site as being very safe. This can be approached by running workshops on-site to support the programme. We recently ran a risk blindness workshop. Once a behavioural safety programme is in place, the real challenge is maintaining the momentum.

Getting started

In our opinion, in order to start a programme you need a relatively mature safety culture and the senior leadership team must be involved in order to stimulate dialogue on the shop floor. Behavioural safety cannot be done from the office, you need active, visible leadership and long-term commitment as it takes time to work on. It is important to be aware that one specific model of behavioural safety may not always be the right fit for every company. For example in 3M we adapt the programme to reflect the cultures in different sites. 

At 3M Aycliffe the programme began as voluntary but it later became mandatory for anyone in a supervisory position, from site managers to team leaders. It then started to move into people’s individual job expectations. Today we have approximately 180 people trained to deliver the PAWS one-to-one dialogue, these include both agency and permanent staff, and a secondary benefit of involving everyone is that we can help foster a collaborative environment where all of our employees feel valued.