How to monitor safe behaviour in safe working cycle?

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How to monitor safe behaviour in safe working cycle?  

Management and staff can identify key safe and at risk behaviour together. These important safe behaviours could then be summarized in a form of observation sheet to establish standards for measuring safe behaviour. Each working group could use this ‘Observation sheet for safe behaviour’ to monitor each other daily and systemically to encourage safe behaviour. Afterwards, according to the results of monitoring, each working group could establish their own improvement targets. To measure the achievement of improvement targets, the safe behaviour of working groups should be measured by ‘percentage of safe performance’. They should be accessible and traceable at any time. Measurement results should be distributed to working groups in a weekly basis to keep them updated on the achievement of improvement targets. The monitoring results of safe behaviour could be distributed to all staff in a monthly basis to keep them updated on the performance of safe behaviour. Tracing and publicizing ‘percentage of safe performance’ could achieve continual identification and improvement of safety problems.

Same as other control measures, planning and organizing is two important factors to success. The area of implementation should be decided prior to implementation.

1.      Find out the problem

To achieve safe behaviour, the first step is to find out the at risk behaviours which account for most of the accident in the construction site. At the beginning stage, the organization could check their existing records of accidents, incidents, procedures and risk assessments. As safe working cycle is specific to individual construction project, site safety committee should be responsible for the planning, implementation and monitoring of the whole programme. The chairman of the committee has the responsibilities to ensure:

• Establishment of ‘observation sheet for safe behaviour’ for each working group;
• Selection of working group members and provide sufficient training;
• Meeting to discuss development of improvement targets;
• Weekly sharing sessions to review safety performance and develop proactive measures which could improve the safety performance; and
• Development of solutions to solve safety problems within the time limit.

2.      Briefing meeting

The briefing meeting should be chaired by the project manager or the chairman of the safety committee to let management and staff understand the importance of the implementation of safe behaviour monitoring. The content of briefing meeting should include:

• Explanation to clarify that implementation of safe behaviour monitoring aims to enhance, but not replace, the existing safe working cycle
• How to implement and the co-operation of staff
• Selection of working group members
• Necessary resources, e.g. time for working groups to monitor safe behaviour, training course, etc

 3.      Form working groups to implement safe behaviour monitoring

Working groups should consist of staff from different positions. There should be two staff coming from the same position in each group. When one of the staff is absent, another can replace her/him. Senior management should be invited to monitor safe behaviour to demonstrate their concern and commitment on the implementation of safe behaviour monitoring.

 4.      Application

Working groups designated by the site safety committee can find out the safe and at risk behaviour that they want to monitor according to their responsible area. Working groups could also define the behavioural standard that they want to achieve, e.g. the use of PPE. The standard can be developed according to the operational procedures in the safety plan. If there is no corresponding procedures, the standard could be developed through working group meetings. These behavioural standards can be summarized in the observation sheet for safe behaviour (see Appendix 10). The group members have to monitor the workers for a period of time every day. They have to record the monitoring results on the observation sheet. The percentage of safe performance can be calculated from the observation sheet.

5.      Review

After a period of time, when the workers have achieve a certain standard of percentage of safe performance, working groups should discuss for further programmes based on this achieved standard (baseline). Further programmes could be awarding scheme, training, modification of work design or procedures to encourage the safe behaviour. After implementing these programmes, working groups should review the effectiveness of these programmes, e.g. whether the targets can be achieved. When the percentage of certain safe performance can be kept at a high standard, the working group can try to solve other at risk behaviour.

 

6.      Effectiveness of programmes

Site safety committee should analyze the monitoring records from each working group to discuss the effectiveness of safe behaviour monitoring programme. The issues that should be responded include:

• The increase/decrease of percentage of safe performance compared with that in the pervious week
• Categorization of safe performance for each type of working groups (‘safe’ or ‘at risk’)
• Calculation of average percentage of safe performance for each type of working groups
• Calculation of percentage of monitoring time for each type of working groups