Maintaining high productivity standards while achieving even higher safety standards is a precarious balance.
According to Gregg Kiihne, director of process safety for BASF, behavior-based process safety may be the most effective approach to achieving that balance.
"A behavior-based safety program is focused on modifying people's behaviors to prevent incidents," Kiihne said during a BIC Magazine roundtable discussion.
A typical behavior-based process safety program will discern and define the target and critical behaviors of operators, maintenance technicians and contractors to ensure they perform various behaviors correctly, Kiihne said.
"Then, we'll reinforce those behaviors through observations," he said.
Explaining the typical elements of a behavior- based system that is being implemented at BASF, Kiihne said most of those observations are typically peer-to-peer - operators observing operators or operators observing contractors - and provide both positive and corrective feedback when needed.
"Essentially, we're trying to [recognize] safety-related bad habits that our people have and replace them with good habits," Kiihne said. "We also have observations that are leader-to-worker observations. We call these 'safety contacts.'"
These safety contacts, he explained, are not so much an opportunity for the leader to correct what someone is doing from a safety perspective as it is an opportunity "to reinforce the messaging of the vision or culture desired and the mindset we want workers to have. You know, to take the time and make sure they're doing [their tasks] correctly."
Another benefit of these observations, Kiihne said, is that they enable workers to detect when there's a barrier in the workplace.
"It could be an organizational or physical barrier," he said. "Or, it could be in the design of the system that's making it difficult or even impossible for the operator to do the job safely as desired, so then we have an opportunity to remove those barriers."
"It's hard to change bad habits into good ones," Kiihne admitted. "But we find that it's much more successful when you work together with a group. You have people holding you accountable. You're working together with your colleagues and peers to reinforce the behavior together. It requires quite a bit of openness and trust to be successful."
According to Rose Luvaas, hazard recognition and nearmiss prevention "is like our bread and butter" to the teams at LyondellBasell Industries. "If we can get everybody to recognize their hazards and prevent near-misses, we're really close to excellence."
As a LyondellBasell site manager, Luvaas recommended packaging process safety information and training in a way that is repetitive and available to people "at the right time."
It is equally essential to pay close attention to how this information and training data is presented. "It's a balance between the stuff that is must-do and compulsory versus why we care about this," she said.
Luvaas noted myriad methods of communicating the process safety message have been utilized throughout the years.
"We've communicated learning from experience through emails, safety meetings and things like that," Luvaas said, adding that most sites across the industry are employing a similar approach to process safety.
"However, it's really about being able to package that information," she reiterated. "There are probably some 'whiz-bang' solutions - any problem you've got, there's somebody out there willing to solve it for you. But in my experience, those haven't been as fruitful as we thought they were going to be."
Sheila Van Geffen, process safety technology leader for Dow Chemical Company, expressed that the drive for excellence and safety is an ever-present quest, although its necessity may not be in the forefront of some workers' minds.
"As we continue improvement in our industry and prevent the bigger events, [some workers] have never experienced a catastrophic event, which is what we want," Van Geffen said. "But at the same time, it creates that challenge for them to be able to recognize the potential and continue that performance excellence."
The challenge of utilizing existing and emerging digital tools and the data "needs to get to the level of everyone being able to recognize potential hazards and what needs to be done to prevent catastrophic events," Van Geffen said.
