A series addressing the top reasons you are having problems with your behavior-based safety system.
1. You did not do your homework.
2. You got an off-the-shelf BBS system instead of a customized process.
3. No pickles, no lettuce—Special orders do upset us: You chose an inflexible consulting firm.
4. You bought complexity instead of basic tools.
5. Your leaders are not involved.
6. You did not know when to ask for help.
7. You don’t know how to deliver effective feedback, recognition, and celebrate success.
5. Your leaders are not involved. By being involved I don’t mean the company leaders just wrote a check. I mean they are out doing safety observations, talking to frontline employees about BBS, attending Safety Committee meetings, and asking questions about progress and participation.
Just like other safety behaviors, leadership involvement needs to be tracked and measured; it needs to be public and they need to be accountable for their participation. The best BBS implementations have obsessed leadership; they talk the talk and walk the walk. They won’t let the process fail, because safety is number one on their values list.
Leadership involvement communicates that the company cares about the well-being of their employees. It lets the public know that the organization has a heart. Customers like companies with a heart, compassion, caring, and respect for their employees.
Each leader needs to have a self-developed, self-managed checklist of specific support behaviors that they use to track themselves against, including goals and public transparency. Leaders need to meet and talk about their individual scores and hold themselves accountable for doing the things that will make safety and your BBS process the key value in the company.
