Win and Win Again: The Blueprint for Repeating Safety Successes
The primary goal of safety is to prevent injuries. We achieve that goal in most cases, though our rare failures often overshadow our frequent successes. And while it’s essential to analyze failures and apply lessons learned, it’s equally if not more important to highlight and replicate our successes. So, let’s explore how to define success, reinforce success and, most critically, ensure repeated and continuous success.
Success Defined
Success can be defined as desired behaviors achieving desired results – with extreme preference given to behaviors. From that definition, and in order from least to most desired, we get the following.
Incident: undesired behaviors with undesired results – someone doing something incorrectly that causes damage, injury or death. For example, I use improper work methods and cut myself with a knife.
Chance: undesired behaviors with desired results – someone doing something incorrectly that does not cause damage, injury or death (e.g., I walk under a suspended load that doesn’t fall).
Compliance: desired behaviors with undesired results – someone doing something correctly that results in damage, injury or death. For instance, I stop at a red light while wearing my seat belt and get rear-ended.
Success: desired behaviors with desired results – someone doing something correctly that does not cause damage, injury or death. As an example, let’s say I use lockout/tagout while performing electrical work and complete the work without shock or flash.
Reinforcing Behavior
To win and then win again, step one is to win and succeed. Assuming success, how do we reinforce and repeat it? Remember WIN, an acronym that stands for work, influence, normalize. The idea is that WIN results in work performed that influences future behavior through its consequences, eliminates undesired behaviors and reinforces desired behaviors.
Before discussing reinforcement of compliance and success, let’s briefly discuss incidents and chance. If an incident has occurred (i.e., undesired behaviors with undesired results), someone did something wrong and got hurt doing it. Aside from the application of disciplinary policies, this person had a negative experience and probably learned their lesson. You touch the stove, it’s hot, you get burned, you don’t touch it again. You don’t need additional reinforcement, punishment or penalty to stay away from the stove in the future.
Chance – undesired behaviors with desired results – needs additional consequences. In the example above, I walk under a suspended load and don’t get hurt. Unless I am provided with consequences that decrease this behavior in the future, complacency will set in and compound over time into normalization of deviation. The key is to understand why the behavior occurred. Was it because I didn’t know better, wasn’t paying attention or made a poor choice?
Compliance, which we earlier defined as desired behaviors with undesired results, is where we must use caution. Negative consequences, such as punishment or penalty, should not be given based on results when the behavior is good. The behavior needs to be positively reinforced, and training may be needed if a skills gap is identified.
Now let’s talk about success (i.e., desired behaviors with desired results) and make it our primary focus moving forward. Look for successes and make sure they are positively reinforced. Too often our attitude is “that’s what we pay them for,” and we don’t provide any feedback or reward. When people succeed, they should be given something they want or be able to avoid things they don’t. Examples include verbal feedback, opportunities to provide training or conduct job briefings, involvement in decision-making, and formal rewards programs.
Correlating Consequences in Practical Applications
One of the most important things to consider is giving each individual and crew a mechanism to do this for themselves, which comes in the form of post-job briefings or after-action reviews. Implement those and let the following questions be part of the conversation: What could we have done better? What did we do well that needs repeating? Were we lucky or were we good? How can we make lucky good and good great?
When performing observations and providing feedback, designate a success reinforcer. Find people above the line on the hierarchy of controls and/or who have direct controls in place for high-energy exposures, and then provide positive feedback. When you deliver that feedback, make sure you understand why the behavior occurred and that the individuals understand the value of repeating their behavior.
Formal rewards programs can be effective at reinforcing and normalizing behavior – if we shift from rewarding what didn’t happen to rewarding what did. Give incentives, for instance, to the person who provided the most peer-to-peer coaching rather than the group that had the lowest incident rate. Or praise the group that reported the most near-misses and good-catches rather than the group with the longest injury-free streak.
Conclusion
One of the biggest challenges in safety is that when it’s working correctly, it gets ignored because nothing happens and no one gets hurt. This can lead to organizational and individual complacency, thinking we have figured this out and can move on to the next thing. If you study human behavior, you’ll quickly learn that any behavior that doesn’t get reinforced – in other words, no good or bad consequences happen – becomes nearly extinct. That means we must positively reinforce success for it to be repeated. If we don’t, success will shift to compliance and ultimately chance and incident.
Learn More
You can learn more about this article by reading my book “Frontline Incident Prevention – The Hurdle: Innovative and Practical Insights on the Art of Safety,” and I hope you’ll join me for the free webinar on this topic January 8 at 11 a.m. Eastern. Thank you for reading, stay safe and be well.
About the Author: David McPeak, CUSP, CIT, CHST, CSP, CSSM, is the director of professional development for Utility Business Media’s Incident Prevention Institute (https://ip-institute.com) and the author of “Frontline Leadership – The Hurdle” and “Frontline Incident Prevention – The Hurdle.” He has extensive experience and expertise in leadership, human performance, safety and operations. McPeak is passionate about personal and professional development and believes that intrapersonal and interpersonal skills are key to success. He also is an advanced certified practitioner in DISC, emotional intelligence, the Hartman Value Profile, learning styles and motivators.
About Frontline Fundamentals: Frontline Fundamentals topics are derived from the Incident Prevention Institute’s popular Frontline training program (https://frontlineutilityleader.com). Frontline covers critical knowledge, skills and abilities for utility leaders and aligns with the Certified Utility Safety Professional exam blueprint.
Webinar: Win and Win Again
January 8, 2025, at 11 a.m. Eastern
Visit https://ip-institute.com/frontline-webinars/ for more information.
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