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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.
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