Behavior Management: A Successful Approach

Abstract

Abstract In the last two decades, organizations have used safety programs and advanced safety management systems to improve their safety performance. Safety management systems, policies, procedures and standards along with better tools and equipment have played an important role in decreasing incident and injury frequencies in the oil and gas industry. However the industry has realized that employee participation is the key to success for all safety programs. Unless employees demonstrate a positive behavior in actively enforcing the safety programs and standards in place, the organization's safety programs remain virtually ineffective. A review of the integrated project management (IPM) arm of an oilfield services company incident reporting database revealed that most of the risk identification reports (RIRs) logged in the system were related to unsafe conditions, whereas only a few were related to unsafe acts. In an effort to reduce this trend, a decision was made to launch a behavior based safety (BBS) program called observation intervention program. The program had already been introduced in some parts of the company but was not formalized. The program was implemented through the company's health, safety and environment (HSE) management system utilizing the company's existing BBS-based program. To measure the success of the program, a number of leading and lagging indicators were chosen from the driving and injury prevention areas. There were four specific areas of observations created in the reporting system: driving, injury prevention, environmental and general observation interventions. The campaign was launched in 2010, and the indicators were monitored for 2010, 2011, and 2012. An analysis of the results revealed that these indicators showed a remarkable improvement with increased employee participation in the BBS program. This paper describes the process of the successful development and implementation of a BBS program and the essential factors that need to be considered in order to improve employee participation and avoid failures.