Learning from Behaviour
The UK's National Nuclear Laboratory has adopted a Behavioural Safety process in pursuit of EXCELLENCE.
Behavioural Safety is:
• A process to enable continuous improvement in culture though encouraging others to think about behaviours and their consequences.
• Discussions are an integral part of the process, allowing observers to influence behaviours and attitudes.
It provides an early warning of accidents and incidents, allowing the measurement of safe (positive) and unsafe (negative) behaviour in the workplace.
Although originally launched within the context of health and safety, the underlying principles are equally applicable to environment, quality and wider operational excellence.
Why Behavioural Safety?
The behavioural safety approach empowers and encourages everyone in the business to pursue improvement. Our aim is to instil a questioning attitude and personal responsibility for environment, health, safety and quality.
Traditional approaches to health and safety improvement have been physical and systems - led. This is changing and many organisations are accepting the importance of recognising the human dimension. The NNL approach focuses on human performance as part of a jigsaw of improvement tools: not losing sight of the crucial importance of safe plant/equipment and robust management systems.
What actually happens in practice?
The Behavioural Safety Process
Training is provided for the whole workforce on general EH&S awareness and behavioural tools, supplemented by regular refresher training. Volunteer Observers are given more detailed additional training and then engage in one-to-one discussion with people at all levels, challenging unsafe/negative behaviours, positively reinforcing safe/positive behaviours. Where required, they gain commitment from individuals for improvement actions. From the information produced, trends are determined, learning points fed back into the organisation and improvements introduced.
The benefits
NNL has benefited from behavioural safety over a number of years. Most notably, it has been a key factor in the improvement of our EH&S culture. Anyone in the business can challenge the EH&S behaviours of anyone else: this has contributed to trust building and a very open reporting culture.
The process itself and the cultural benefits have been recognised in our success within the RoSPA Research and Development Sector. In 2008, we won our fifth successive Sector Award.
The bottom line
Our motto for behavioural safety is Working Together – The Target is Zero. Through challenging negative behaviours and praising the positive, we continue on the journey to zero accidents and incidents.
