Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries
Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations introduces a new generation within safety management, fully developed with neuropsychological insights, developed in collaboration with, and put to test by, the chemical and process industries. Until now, there has been little theoretical framework on how, and especially why, people behave the way they do in hazardous situations.Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations presents new theories, based on a human behavioral approach, to offer a fresh perspective on safety management. By way of case studies, practical tips and exercises, Dr Jan Daalmans demonstrates how this neuropsychological approach can be applied for those safety managers working in the Chemical, Process and Pharmaceutical industries. - Presents new brain-based approaches to safety, with a historical perspective on the evolution of the safety management - Practical tips and guidance for those working in the chemical and process industries - Including exercises and case studies to demonstrate the practical application of techniques
1134784644
Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries
Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations introduces a new generation within safety management, fully developed with neuropsychological insights, developed in collaboration with, and put to test by, the chemical and process industries. Until now, there has been little theoretical framework on how, and especially why, people behave the way they do in hazardous situations.Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations presents new theories, based on a human behavioral approach, to offer a fresh perspective on safety management. By way of case studies, practical tips and exercises, Dr Jan Daalmans demonstrates how this neuropsychological approach can be applied for those safety managers working in the Chemical, Process and Pharmaceutical industries. - Presents new brain-based approaches to safety, with a historical perspective on the evolution of the safety management - Practical tips and guidance for those working in the chemical and process industries - Including exercises and case studies to demonstrate the practical application of techniques
34.95 In Stock
Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries

Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries

by Jan M T Daalmans
Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries

Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations: Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries

by Jan M T Daalmans

eBook

$34.95 

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations introduces a new generation within safety management, fully developed with neuropsychological insights, developed in collaboration with, and put to test by, the chemical and process industries. Until now, there has been little theoretical framework on how, and especially why, people behave the way they do in hazardous situations.Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations presents new theories, based on a human behavioral approach, to offer a fresh perspective on safety management. By way of case studies, practical tips and exercises, Dr Jan Daalmans demonstrates how this neuropsychological approach can be applied for those safety managers working in the Chemical, Process and Pharmaceutical industries. - Presents new brain-based approaches to safety, with a historical perspective on the evolution of the safety management - Practical tips and guidance for those working in the chemical and process industries - Including exercises and case studies to demonstrate the practical application of techniques

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780124072220
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Publication date: 10/30/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 214
File size: 3 MB

Read an Excerpt

Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations

Best Practice Safety Management in the Chemical and Process Industries
By Juni Daalmans

Butterworth-Heinemann

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc.
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-12-407222-0


Chapter One

Evolution of Safety Management

1.1 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 1 1.2 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 2 1.3 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 3 1.4 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 4 1.5 SUMMARY TIPS FOR TRANSFER

Safety management as we know it today started just after World War II. Before that period, the most common practice was to pray to Saint Barbara, protector of miners and workers. Unfortunately, Saint Barbara was not very effective. At that time, even small charcoal mines had a few casualties each year. Saint Barbara chapels were used as morgues, and many miners frequently went there to bid farewell to their former colleagues.

1.1 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 1

Just after World War II, the chemical industry started to develop itself on a broad scale, mostly as an offspring of other industrial activities. As technology improved, the risks involved with the production process increased. One example is the experimenting with carbon–fluorine connections by DuPont, which eventually led to the discovery of Teflon. Because this compound was highly explosive, the company realized that production could only be started if it took extra safety measures. Without these extra measures, the factory would explode even before production really started. At the same time, the world was recovering from the effects of the Second World War. So many men were killed to regain freedom. In this light, it became unacceptable to place more men in danger just because of work. From today's perspective, it is an obvious decision (at least in some regions of the world), but at that time, it was a real breakthrough in thinking about labor: Work should be possible without fatal accidents. Factories were developed much more safely, equipment was tested for safety, and all workers started to wear safety protection adjusted for each task. This breakthrough can be qualified as a paradigm shift. The new paradigm was that each employee should reach his retirement alive—overlooking the fact that silicosis for miners was still widespread. In the paradigm shift, people concluded that human life was more important than the profit of the company. It would take us many years to find out that most safety costs showed a positive return on investment due to a more stable process performance.

1.2 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 2

The new way of thinking and working proved effective, as the casualty rate dropped dramatically. In the 1960s, the incident rate in the chemical industry stabilized at a certain level, and many companies around the world embraced the idea that more was needed to create a safer work environment. Then the focus shifted to those using the equipment: the employees. They still could act unsafely in safe environments. Controlling the behavior of employees would improve safety levels. With this in mind, a second breakthrough was the introduction of procedures and protocols to regulate work and work behavior. Roles and responsibilities were defined, tasks were described, and employees were instructed to work according to procedures. Certification of people, parts, and procedures became standard. Technical risk assessment was introduced. The paradigm shift was that a safe plant alone was no guarantee that accidents would not happen; instead, teaching employees how to perform a certain task would increase the safety. Focus shifted to acting according to the book. Sticking to rules is an important way of regulating behavior in many regular activities today. The downside is that it only works in standard situations.

1.3 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 3

In the 1990s, companies were again facing the fact that the incident rate stabilized at an unacceptable level, for that moment. More of the same interventions no longer reduced the incident rate. A new breakthrough in approach was needed. Not all the behavior in the workplace could be described in procedures. Besides that, people don't like to be prescribed how to behave; they have a natural tendency to break rules that don't suit them. Procedures require constant management attention that cannot always be provided. To address this, employers needed to find another mechanism to control human behavior, and the answer was found in looking at the social environment. Thus, the focus shifted to personal behavior. The paradigm shift was that prescriptions on how to carry out tasks were not sufficient for generating safety. Employees had to be convinced to follow behavioral guidelines under all circumstances, not only when prescribed; personal accountability became part of the safety policy. A second element in this renewal was the focus on social control in addition to management attention. It was recognized that the behavior of the team had at least the same influencing effect as the supervision of the boss. By recognizing that, safety management also became a cultural issue. The new approach embraced a social view on behavior and behavioral change. The team was seen as the most appropriate level to enhance and guard safety behavior. The ideal was that employees mutually challenge and stimulate each other to embrace proactive ways of behavior: solving an emerging problem before it actually became one. Theories like the High Reliability Organization (HRO) and Hearts and Minds operate successfully on this level.

This breakthrough again helped people reduce the number of incidents, but the incident rate has stabilized at a certain level of OSHAs during the last few years. Among some, there is a belief that, although it is not easy, work free of incidents is possible. Strangely enough, we now have the same discussion as those at the onset of safety management, only the subject has changed slightly. At that time, those who thought that work without fatalities would not be possible challenged those who had the ideal of a workplace free of them. The only difference in the discussion is that we now talk about incidents instead of fatalities. Fortunately, the idea that all people can leave their work in the same health as they began is winning support. As in every breakthrough in thinking, a solution that is the result of more of the same approach does not work. We need a new, fourth paradigm shift to create brain-based safety.

1.4 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 4

The crucial question now is how do we create this new breakthrough in management thinking? A problem with a paradigm shift is that you don't see it until you have made it. Fortunately, the history of safety management can help us.

When we analyze the first breakthrough, we see that safety started with a technological approach focused on building safe systems (for example, equipment or logistics). Engineers developed the roots of safety management; even today, we can see that the majority of the safety professionals have an engineering background. The second breakthrough was focused on how to use the systems: the procedures and protocols. Man is seen as a robot that needs to be programmed to follow the rules that safety specialists have developed and described. The third breakthrough focused on the users and their community: the responsibility to act safely, especially when it is not possible to describe the work to be done in procedures. One is asked to act according the spirit of the rules and to stimulate each other to do the same.

The trend is clear: Further progress in safety management can only be achieved by focusing on the human factor. In other words, the final breakthrough to complete safety can only be found deep inside the actor: at the moment a person perceives and estimates the amount of risk involved in a certain activity and at the point where he chooses his actions, where he has the option to act more or less safely.

History teaches us that safety management has a very consistent value system (work should be possible without harming people), in which the norms are upgraded from time to time. Safety management started from a technological approach outside the human system and moved step by step via the expertise area of labor psychology, via the more social team approach into the field of intrapersonal psychology. If we are able to influence the mind of a person at the moment she decides what to do and how to act, it will be possible to generate safer work behavior. We are in need of new areas of expertise that can teach us more about human behavior in general and the process of estimating risks in particular.

Fortunately, recent developments in neurobiology and neuropsychology are deepening our insights into how people make decisions and what kind of brain processes are involved. One of the major problems is that decision processes in the brain are far from conscious and rational. In these processes, different sources of "information" are used, from very logical analyses to very intuitive emotional estimations. The main challenge is to influence the internal processes of weighing risks. The holy grail of safety management can be found by understanding the essence of human behavior, the principles by which we perceive our environment, digest the information, and come to action. The challenge of this book is to transfer all the recent knowledge in this field into understanding safe behavior and into ways of influencing these processes.

1.5 SUMMARY

Safety management started as an economic necessity and as a result of changing values. During the last 60 years, the developments in this professional area can be described as a combination of revolution and evolution. Each revolution in approach is accompanied by a paradigm shift, a new perspective. Stepwise ideas have changed from the notion that work should be possible without casualties, via the notion that safety can only be accomplished if employees stick to certain rules and contribute to safety as a result of personal responsibility, to the notion that a collective approach can make it possible that everybody leaves work in the same health in which they started. Each step contributes to an integral safety approach and enlarges the focus. Safety management has changed from a pure technical approach to a multidisciplinary one, integrating engineering with labor and personal psychology. The final step is to understand human safety behavior and to influence that from all possible perspectives. The recent developments in neuropsychology can attribute to this understanding.

TIPS FOR TRANSFER

Tip 1: Assess the Present State of Safety Management in your Organization

As far as you can assess the quality of the actual current safety management, how mature is the state of the art in your organization on each of the following four levels? Explain your answers using some keywords.

Level 1: Plants, tools, systems

Level 2: Procedures, protocols, safety regulations

Level 3: Culture, behavior, responsibility

Level 4: Attitudes, beliefs, information processing

Tip 2: Use the Checklist to Make a Diagram

Score each of the following questions on a 5-point scale, varying from "I don't agree" (score 1) to "I fully agree" (score 5). Add the totals per level (minimum 4 and maximum 20) and draw a diagram.

Level 1: Plants, tools, systems

1. The technical installations in my company are safe.

2. The maintenance of our installations guarantees maximal safety.

3. Employees have and use all tools needed to act safely.

4. Regular safety inspections and deviations are addressed.

Level 2: Procedures, protocols, safety regulations

5. All external regulations (for example, government policies) are integrated into the company's way of working.

6. Employees know all rules involved in doing their specific tasks safely.

7. Employees understand the reason behind each of the procedures.

8. If a person or a team neglects safety rules, they receive feedback to change behavior.

Level 3: Culture, behavior, responsibility

9. Employees are dedicated to work safely.

10. Even if management needs to make painful decisions, safety is always guaranteed.

11. Like employees, contractors are instructed in safe working.

12. If somebody behaves unsafely, he is corrected by his peers.

Level 4: Attitudes, beliefs, information processing

13. Employees are instructed to sense all risks involved while working.

14. Employees understand their own work processes and possible dangers involved.

15. People who work here have a true conviction in behaving safely.

16. Safety at home is treated with the same care as safety at work.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Human Behavior in Hazardous Situations by Juni Daalmans Copyright © 2013 by Elsevier Inc. . Excerpted by permission of Butterworth-Heinemann. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Dedication General Introduction to This Book Approach and Main Questions Perspective on Human Behavior The Structure of This Book Part 1. Safety in Perspective Chapter 1. Evolution of Safety Management 1.1 Safety Management Level 1 1.2 Safety Management Level 2 1.3 Safety Management Level 3 1.4 Safety Management Level 4 1.5 Summary Tips for Transfer Chapter 2. Evolution of Brain and Risk 2.1 Stage 1, from 300 Million to 200 Million Years Ago—The Development of the Basic Brain 2.2 Stage 2, from 200 Million to 2.5 Million Years Ago—The Development of the Emotional Brain 2.3 Stage 3, from 2.5 Million to 10 Thousand Years Ago—The Development of the Modern Brain 2.4 Stage 4, from 10 Thousand to 200 Years Ago—The Development of Risk Tolerance 2.5 Stage 5, the Last 200 Years—The Sudden Increase of New Dangers 2.6 Conscious and Nonconscious 2.7 Combining the Topic of Consciousness and the Three Parts of the Brain 2.8 Where in the Brain? 2.9 Summary Tips for Transfer Part 2. Risk and Safety in a Neuropsychological Perspective Chapter 3. Risk Sensitivity: The Perception of Risks 3.1 Creating Risk Sensitivity 3.2 Reducing Risk Sensitivity 3.3 The Combined Effect of Newness and Sensitivity 3.4 Where in the Brain? 3.5 Summary Tips for Transfer Chapter 4. Risk Understanding: Knowing Risks 4.1 Enhancing Risk Understanding 4.2 The Development of Risk Understanding 4.3 Combining Newness, Sensitivity, and Awareness 4.4 Where in the Brain? 4.5 Summary Tips for Transfer Chapter 5. Safety Intuition: The Nonconscious Guide to Safety 5.1 Why Safety Always Needs Effort: Unbalances in the Feedback System of Safety Behavior 5.2 Gut Feeling, the Nonconscious Guide 5.3 The Role of Smell in the Danger System 5.4 Ambivalence toward Safety Costs and the Avoidance of Unsafe Situations 5.5 The Perception of Reasonable Costs 5.6 Unrealistic Optimism: Denying the Risk Probability 5.7 Intuition: Traces of the Nonconscious in the Conscious 5.8 Where in the Brain? 5.9 Summary Tips to Transfer Chapter 6. Safety Awareness: The Conscious Guide to Safety 6.1 Awareness and Alertness 6.2 The Relationship Between Brain Frequency, Stress, and Alertness 6.3 Where in the Brain and the Body? 6.4 Summary Tips for Transfer Part 3. Influencing Safety Behavior Behavior The Role of Consciousness in Behavior Changing Behavior: How the Conscious and Nonconscious Systems Work Together Where in the Brain? Tips for Transfer Chapter 7. Influencing Safety Behavior via An Individual Approach 7.1 What is a Safety Buddy? 7.2 Who Can Play the Role of Safety Buddy? 7.3 What Competences are Required for a Safety Buddy? 7.4 What are the Activities of a Safety Buddy? 7.5 The Safety Buddy and his Influence on Self-Image Tips for Transfer Chapter 8. Influencing Safety Behavior via a Team Approach 8.1 What Makes a Group of People a Team or a Family? 8.2 How Does Mirroring Work? 8.3 Mirroring and Team Culture 8.4 Mirror Systems and Behavioral Change 8.5 The Scope of Mirroring 8.6 Who Can Play the Role of a Challenger? 8.7 Where in the Brain? 8.8 Summary Tips for Transfer Chapter 9. Influencing Safety Behavior via An Organizational Approach 9.1 The Role of Management 9.2 Management as a Model 9.3 Managing Stress 9.4 Managing the Readiness to Take Risks 9.5 Managing an Enhancing Safety Atmosphere 9.6 Managing Rules and Regulations within an Organization 9.7 Corporate Safety Programs Based on Priming 9.8 Summary Tips for Transfer Part 4. Organizational Safety Management Chapter 10. How to Manage Safety in an Organization 10.1 Monitoring Safety 10.2 Regression Effects 10.3 HR and Safety: Rewarding Safety Behavior? 10.4 Summary Tips for Transfer Safety Philosophy Bibliography Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A new approach to safety management in the chemical and process industries, starting with the human brain

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews