Few people will argue against the importance of human behaviors when assessing risk in a hazardous environment. Whilst it is possible to reduce risk using good engineering design of equipment and processes, it is far more difficult to measure and influence human behavior. People are strongly affected by the safety culture, leadership, attitudes and many other “intangible” factors that are a fact of life on any plant.
Businesses need to be able to measure and take action on all the factors that may increase the risk of accidents. But how do you measure people's behavior, and what tools can you use to collate this data and analyse it effectively?
A culture of safety can be facilitated by making everyone responsible for reporting unsafe practices so that corrective steps can be taken. To achieve this, companies typicaly implement an incident reporting system. Such a system is however not always effective in that people are sometimes by nature reluctant to report incidents, particularly if they are “near misses” or relatively minor in nature. An incident management system is unlikely to identify bad habits that are risky and have become the norm in a particular plant. To solve this problem a ubiquitous system is required that encourages reporting of all behaviors, particularly those that are safety or risk related. And the best way to implement this is to have each employee on the plant involved and encouraged to make behavioral observations on an ongoing basis and part of their day to day job.
FlexiLOGTM ’s template based approach allows you to configure a system for your plant that captures observations from the entire workforce (process operators, artisans, engineers, technicians and contractors), and allows subsequent trending and analysis of this information. This tool can be put to good use by each employee who becomes responsible for making regular job observations, and capturing this into the system. Typically these observations are for situations where safety is a concern, but the system can also be used to capture positive examples and desired behaviors to be built into the plant standing instructions or procedures. FlexiLOGTM can allow these behavioral observations to be classified and captured anonymously for aggregation and analysis by plant management, or the system can be configured such that the person capturing the information can be personally identified so that they can be rewarded afterwards for their contribution towards reducing risk.
By making each and every person responsible for job observations, and providing an accessible and robust tool for the capturing and classification of behaviors; you can make significant progress towards a culture of safety and reduced risk of human error. FlexiLOGTM has been used in this manner in highly hazardous environments to good effect.