ALWAYS ALWAYS, NEVER NEVER

By David Dehaas

The word "habit" has a wide meaning, and it means different things to different people. However, in terms of "safety habits" -- good or bad -- it can be taken to mean a certain learned behaviour, a pattern of actions done a certain way, in a certain order. Once we have formed a habit for a given task, we do it that way all the time, every time, without having to think about it. It is learned, it is repeatedly practiced and it is a deeply ingrained. And once it is learned, practiced and ingrained, it is extremely difficult to change. (For "good" habits, that a good thing; for "bad" habits, it’s a bad thing.)

Where do habits fit into safety? Everywhere. They are much relied on -- over-relied on, in many people’s view -- and you can spot them by the two words: "always" and "never". These two words come up entirely too often in safety policies, safe operating procedures and safety training. In fact, there are many documents, purporting to be safe operating procedures, that consist of little else than a series of statements starting either with "Always" or "Never": Always do this, always be sure to do that, never do this and never, never do the other thing.

But what does the always-always-never-never list really mean? First, it means that there are critical safety issues that still depend solely on the actions of workers on the job -- the "never" and the "always" refer to commissions and omissions that have immediate safety consequences. Always wear your welding shield, or you will damage your eyes. Never reach your hand into the gears, or you’ll lose it.

One of the biggest problems with the always-always-never-never approach is that it is entirely too easy to avoid difficult solutions with an always or a never. ("Hey, we told him a hundred times never to put his hand in the press.") So it’s important to decide which tasks can and should be made safe through the behaviour -- or habits -- of workers, and which ought to have a "harder" solution, such as elimination of the hazard or engineering controls.

As a general rule, behaviour and procedure should be the last resort. In some cases, after hazards have been eliminated or reduced, after all practical engineering controls have been applied, and after barriers and warning devices have been installed, worker behaviour -- the safe operating procedure -- is still left as the only way to deal with residual hazard. In that case, you’ll have to develop a safety habit.

Developing safe habits

Take holding a chain saw properly, for example. (Get in the habit of holding it the wrong way and, sooner or later, it will jump up and bite you.) Do we want the worker to pick up the chain saw and have to decide, each time, to hold it the right way? Or do we want to structure our training, supervision and company culture so that everyone knows the right way and does it that way automatically?

The latter, obviously. And to get to that happy plane of existence, we need to build a safe working habit. Here’s how.

First, we need to determine what the habit should be. Clearly, it should be the best way, the safest way, the most efficient way and the most practical way. In fact, it absolutely must be, because if it is not efficient and practical we are never going to succeed in making it anyone’s habit -- no matter how many safety talks we give, no matter how many posters we put up, no matter how many toasters we give away. There’s a safety rule in this: If people just won’t do it the right way, it’s not the right way. (How do you determine what the best way is? That’s a subject for an entire article, but talk to equipment manufacturers, talk to safety experts and, most of all, talk to the people who do the job to develop a "right way" that everyone is happy with.)

Then the required behaviour has to be learned and understood on a conscious level. ("This is how we do it. This is why we have to do it that way. Here’s what happens if we do it any other way. It’s our policy, a condition of employment, to do it this way. Any better ideas?" Any questions?) The right procedure, explained the right way, consistently enforced and reinforced, generates buy-in as a birthright.

Next, the people who need to acquire the habit need to understand that they need to acquire the habit. In other words, they have to understand about habits. It’s not enough to explain that "this is the right way to hold a chain saw"; we need to explain that, in a task such as this, we can’t stop to think about the "right way" every time we start to cut. It’s the habit that will drive the procedure and the procedure that will provide protection. It has to be automatic, it has to be a habit, it’s the mark of the true professional.

Then the behaviour that we want to turn into a habit has to be practiced -- repeated the same way, over and over again. Yes, it’s difficult, at first; yes, it may feel a little awkward; there may be ways that seem easier, there may be shortcuts that seem appealing; but, with practice, the right way gets easier and easier. The art of learning a new habit consists of consciously performing the task in the desired way until it becomes second nature -- until doing it any other way becomes unthinkable.

Developing a habit, or teaching one, must concentrate on ensuring that only the right way gets practiced. Training should be intensely hands-on at first, the supervision constant and the correction immediate. (It has been said that, if each correct repetition is a step forward, doing it wrong once counts for 10 steps backward.)

The best positive reinforcement for a safety habit is incredibly powerful, but almost impossible to achieve if the steps described above are not followed. Simply put, if the task in question really requires a habit, and if the procedure taught is really the most intelligent and practical one, workers will develop a sense of pride and professionalism in doing it right. Their identity as competent professionals gets caught up in behaving, well, competently and professionally. They wouldn’t dream of letting a co-worker see them doing the job with anything less than thorough professionalism.

Drift and reinforcement

Habits, however deeply ingrained, will nevertheless tend to drift off centre. Even though we may have learned and developed good habits, there are ways in which we might start to deviate from the safe procedure. We might inadvertently leave out a step or make a mistake. We may suddenly decide to try something new. If we’re hurried, we might look for faster ways to do the job; we might even be willing to accept reduced quality of work or increased risk of accident to catch up with a backlog or meet a deadline. We may see others deviating from the procedure, lowering their standards of performance or taking a shortcut; and we may find our faith in the need to follow the safe operating procedure shaken as a result.

But if we even once give in to the temptation to abandon the safe operating procedure, we are doing something much more significant than merely taking one little chance or shortcut. We are poking a hole in our safety net of good habits, we are setting a precedent that will now be easier to repeat in less favourable circumstances, and we are laying the groundwork for a brand new habit -- a bad one.

That’s where reinforcement comes in. Refresher training from time to time. Supervisors who have the time to supervise, who are not cowed by touchy labour relations or delicate staff morale, and who are not afraid to supervise. Tail-gate safety meetings. Training new workers, not only in the procedure, but in the culture that says, "This is how we do it around here." And, of course, the odd disparaging remark about "amateurs" -- people at other workplaces who don’t have the professional habits -- can be extremely effective. Casual positive reinforcement can be equally powerful: "We’ll get Bob to train the new guy, he’s a real pro."

If all of this sounds too good to be true, remember the first two requirements of a safe working habit: First, they will work only in those situations where a procedure really is the last resort and the only way to make a task safe; second they will only work if the procedure really is the best, safest, most efficient and most practical way to do the job. A procedure -- a safe working habit -- should be the high water mark of professionalism, not an excuse for failure to deal with a hazard in more efficient ways.

HOW TO BUILD A HABIT

If there is a situation that requires a safe working habit -- a hazard that cannot be dealt with in any other way -- it is necessary to build that habit in a deliberate and organized way. Posters, training and incentive programs cannot and will not do the job by themselves. Instead, you need an organized program that inludes the following elements:

• determine whether or not a safe operating procedure (a safe working habit) is the only way to deal with a hazard, that all other means have been exhausted;
  
• determine what the best procedure is;
  
• educate workers on the need for this procedure, why it’s necessary and why it’s best;
  
• generate "buy-in" by educating workers on the concept of safe working habits, why it’s necessary to learn how to perform the procedure the same way, every time, without having to think it through;
  
• teach the required procedure by having workers practice it the same way, over and over again;
  
• be sure that only the "right way" gets practiced, and be ready to intervene in training immediately;
  
• provide supervision with enough time to supervise and the ability to correct deviations from the procedure; and
  
• provide reinforcement, positive and negative, to keep the right-way "culture" alive.

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