Let's continue our discussion about measuring safety performance and how it affects organizational culture by examining the role of feedback.

How Feedback Motivates Behavior

Many supervisors, managers and safety professionals fail to grasp the importance of feedback on measurement. Human beings by nature look to others to evaluate their performance. Why? We want to win, to be recognized for doing a good job and adding value. And we want to receive feedback as soon as possible, especially if we know we've done well.

Consider the example of sports. Games like baseball involve a steady stream of feedback while the performance is occurring, batter by batter, inning by inning. Figure skaters receive their feedback right after they skate their routine. In clock games like basketball, football and hockey, feedback in the form of the score and time remaining serve to motivate the players and the fans. Excitement builds when your team is ahead and the clock shows only a few seconds to go.

Applying the Lesson to Safety

Just think what we could do if we could build similar excitement and tension in safety. Sadly, we don't use these feedback mechanisms to motivate safe behaviors. On the contrary, we only measure the negative behaviors like accidents and incidents. Sure, we provide feedback to our workers - but only to let them know that they have 'screwed-up.'

Another big mistake managers make is waiting until the end of the month to provide feedback regarding safety performance. Feedback is best as a motivator when it's delivered fresh, that is, during or right after the performance. It tends to get stale in a month and it can even be ineffective after only a week. Think about it. Have you ever done something you think deserves some form of recognition or acknowledgement and you don't receive it until the following week? It isn't the same as hearing back the next day, is it?

Changing Our Feedback Mechanisms

What should we do differently in the realm of safety performance? First of all, we need to define the right criteria to indicate successful performance. What is the "goal," the "homerun," the "touchdown?" In safety, we don't do a good job of identifying the activities that equate to success. What we need to do is ask the question: Are we measuring what we have to do to win?

All too often, measuring safety performance falls into just being a numbers game that overlooks the value of the underlying activity being measured. Examples:

We typically measure and track numbers of employees who attend safety meetings. We shoot for a goal of 100% attendance. Although getting employees to show up at safety meetings is certainly important, the paramount concern, at least initially, should be the effectiveness of the meeting measured against pre-defined objectives. There are at least 15 safety meeting objectives that can easily be identified to be part of a simple survey that would be completed by attendees.

We routinely measure the number of safety audits performed against the required number for the month. But shouldn't we be measuring the percentage of audits performed that have met the agreed upon objectives? For example, was feedback provided to individuals when warranted; were deficiencies handled appropriately; and were results communicated back to the area that was audited? These as well as other objectives could be easily answered by the audit team upon completion of the audit.

Safety suggestions are often measured by submittals per employee per year. Rather, shouldn't we be measuring the effectiveness of safety suggestions - that is, the percentage of suggestions that have been successfully implemented, suggestions responded to within a certain period of time and feedback provided to the person who suggested it?

Conclusion

If we just measure the number of times safety-related activities occur, be it JSA's performed, S.O.P.'s reviewed, work orders written, etc., it is not by itself enough to improve safety performance. Why? Because if these numbers don't meet a goal, the typical motivation attached to these numbers is negative. To achieve improvement we must also evaluate and measure the effectiveness of the activities themselves and allow the numbers to motivate employees to improve. Before we begin measuring anything, we need to ask questions like: "Why are we doing this activity and what are we trying to achieve by measuring it?" To answer those questions we must define desired outputs and outcomes and measure whether the activity is actually helping us to influence those outcomes. It is in the course of performing this analysis that we can expect to find the way to safety improvement.

Next week, I'll wrap up the series by explaining how to put this process into motion.

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