New model adaptable to any work site
Asking workers to adhere to safety measures is critical, of course, but if a couple of basic points are not addressed first, the efforts of the best occupational health and safety professional might not be enough to ward off accidents.
“In any endeavor, if you want people to do something, you have to have four key elements in place,” says Dianne Dyck, MSc, BN, RN, COHN-C, COHN-S, manager of occupational health and safety for ENMAX Corp. in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. “They have to know what you want them to do, they have to be able to do it, be equipped to do it, and want to do it.”
These elements make up the framework of a safety model she calls Great Safety Performance, which she developed along with health consultant Tony Roithmayr, MEd. Dyck and Roithmayr presented their findings and the model for Great Safety Performance at the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses (AAOHN) Expo in April.
Dyck says the model is “complex simplicity” that takes some getting used to, but can be applied to any work environment. “It’s like gravity,” she says. “It’s present in every environment and in every organization.”
Maximize performance to improve safety
The Great Safety Performance model is a process that describes how companies can improve safety by maximizing the conditions for safety in their workplaces. Dyck says that the model looks at what happened leading up to unsafe work performance as one way to identify and manage the leading indicators of work safety.
By looking at the leading indicators of safety performance (the conditions for safety and ongoing safe work actions) and the lagging indicators of safety (outcomes and results showing safe work actions have been performed), she says, employers have material by which they can constantly improve safety. Together, managers and workers can jointly create conditions through which they all will know what to do, be able to do it, be equipped to do it, want to do it, and experience interactions that support safe performance in their job duties.
Dyck breaks down the four key elements this way:
- Know what to do. What occupational health and safety professionals want is for employees to work safely.
- Be able to do it. This is a very broad condition, describing the physical, mental, and educational ability of an employer to do what is asked of him or her.
- Be equipped to do it. Does the employee have the tangible equipment, training, and job aids to work safely?
- Want to do it. The employees must want to do the work and to do it safely and to the standards that management demands.
The model was developed by Roithmayr as a human performance model used in his consulting work. “I asked him, ‘Can’t that work in safety?’” Dyck recalls. She introduced the model to team at ENMAX, an electric power company in Canada, and together they developed the Great Safety Performance model and used it to help improve the workplace safety culture and reduce by 90% the number of injuries sustained on the job by ENMAX meter readers.
The ENMAX research group worked with 65 meter readers who were new to the company. Their safety results (lost-time injury frequency and severity rates) were five times higher than those of the rest of the company, Dyck says, and not only were they not overly concerned, they believed that workplace injuries were an inherent part of meter reading.
Among the hazards they encounter while reading meters on their routes are icy or slippery sidewalks and steps, traffic accidents, meters obscured by clutter or vegetation, stinging insects and menacing dogs, bad weather, and other conditions that cause injury.
After being introduced to the Great Safety Performance model and putting it into place at ENMAX, over a period of 18 months (December 2001 through July 2003), the meter readers’ four key elements (knowing what to do and being able, equipped, and motivated to work safely) improved significantly.
But the bottom line, Dyck points out, was the reduction in lost time from injuries — the number of lost-time injury incidents (per 200,000 works hours) went from 33 in December 2001 to none in July 2003.
A natural for nurses
Dyck says occupational health nurses are uniquely qualified to apply the Great Performance Model to their work environments because of their training. “Something very basic to nursing is that we work in a systems approach, with closed systems that have input, throughput, and output,” she says. “This is a closed system. The four leading indicators of safety are the environment in which we all work.”
Those four key elements or leading indicators are present in every organization, she explains, and they can be managed and changed to affect outcomes. “We define what these look like,” Dyck says. “Do people know what to do? We look at the ways they have been trained. Look at their training logs and exams, their performance appraisals. Ask them.
“Each of the four can be measured using an evaluation that was developed along with the University of Calgary, and it’s very predictable: If you measure the leading indicators of safety [the Great Performance Measure uses a scale of 1 to 100], the higher they are, the less likely you are to have accidents. It’s very, very predictable of work practices.”
How to remedy the gaps
Once the measures for the leading indicators are made, an employer knows where the gaps are in the workplace’s safety system, and must decide how to close them. “You ask two questions: Do you do this, and how important is it to you?” Dyck explains. “People tend to do the things that are important to them. If [safety] is really important to them, but the performance isn’t there, then you know those are the things to work on.”
Addressing the four key elements simultaneously is important, Dyck says, because they are interdependent. If training is inadequate, and workers aren’t able to do their jobs safely, for example, their level of wanting to do it will likely drop.
Lack of four elements causes stress
Aside from having an impact on safety, the four leading indicators of safety can reflect the level of stress among workers. Roithmayr’s firm conducted a survey of workplaces in Calgary and discovered that in worksites where employees reported they were unclear about what their job demands are (what to do), don’t get the coaching and tools they need to meet job demands (able and equipped to do it), and don’t receive the recognition they need to stay motivated (want to do it), they also identified their workplaces as sites of stress.
For more information, contact:
- Dianne Dyck, RN, BN, MSc, COHN(C), COHN-S, Manager, Occupational Health and Safety, ENMAX Corp., Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Phone: (403) 514-3657. E-mail: [email protected].
- Tony Roithmayr, MEd, President, Performance by Design, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Web site: www.performance-bydesign.com.
Asking workers to adhere to safety measures is critical, of course, but if a couple of basic points are not addressed first, the efforts of the best occupational health and safety professional might not be enough to ward off accidents.
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