Leadership, Behaviour and Awareness
The need to address at-risk behaviours and increase safety awareness is integral to achieving Zero Harm in safety, as outlined in Our Future State. Effective safety leadership is crucial to the success of our safety programs. We therefore hold line management accountable for the safety of our operations.
Behavioural-based safety is the process of involving our people in defining the ways they are most likely to be injured and asking them to observe co-workers and engage them in discussion that reinforces safe behaviours and identifies ways the job can be done more safely.
The behavioural-based safety process has greatest impact when everyone on site conducts safety observations. Research has proven that the observer develops a far greater awareness of hazards and risks than those being observed. Two other critical factors are that a positive discussion occurs on the job as part of every safety observation and that management uses the feedback from these discussions to eliminate barriers to safe behaviour.
We recommend that our sites employ the following principles in developing behavioural-based safety programs:
- Sustainable behaviour change, and subsequent culture change, requires change in employee behaviour at all levels.
- Behaviours are markers of attitudes and beliefs and are amenable to change through observation, feedback and the removal of barriers to safe behaviour.
- The changes sought for safety culture improvement are often those that are required for general Company cultural change.
- Employee participation and ownership of the process is essential.
We aim to increase safe behaviour and decrease at-risk behaviour by involving our leadership, employees and contractors. We seek to understand where and why at-risk behaviours occur. Blame has no place in a behavioural-based safety program.
Our HSEC Management Standards require the implementation of behavioural-based safety programs across our operations.
By observing employees going about their daily tasks and then engaging them in two-way communication, focusing on the safety aspects of the job, we have started gathering information about at-risk behaviours that exist in the workplace. By engaging workers in the process, such practices are highlighted; and solutions are often volunteered from the employees themselves.
We recognise, however, that due to varying levels of maturity across the organisation, there is still progress to be made in entrenching safe behaviour observations before we can derive meaningful leading indicators from them.
