Countng Cards

This is, unfortunately, not about how to break the bank in Las Vegas, but a view on measures and targets for the completion of safety observation cards.  Many companies in high hazard industries employ some form of mechanism for all employees to record unsafe acts or unsafe conditions they identify whilst carrying out their duties.  The cards are used to also record the action they took as a result, be it the steps taken to fix something that was out of place or the conversation had with the perpetrator of an unsafe act.   Pre-printed cards are often used and there are standard approaches available, such as Behavioural Observation Safety System (BOSS) and Dupont’s STOP^TM, that provide the back-up training and coaching to use the cards and intervene in the right way.

These observation cards also provide a set of data on which to gauge safety performance and culture.  Many organisations use targets for individuals to complete a defined number of observation cards (eg four per month) but this always raises a debate about the value of forcing people to make observations.  So what are the two sides of this debate: “Should all individuals have targets for the number of Safety Observation cards they complete”?

For:

• It forces people to think about safety which is particularly important in regions where the underlying culture of safety is poor (such as across much of  Asia). Getting people to think about safety and feedback to each other makes observation cards a key tool for safety culture progression
• It is possible to use the data from observation cards to spot trends that need remedial action and identify where people are not taking safety observations seriously and using them as examples of what not to do (ie using poor quality observations to drive better quality ones)
• The target itself provides leaders with a visible platform to explain why everyone must think about safety.  Acting on some key issues thrown up by the content of the cards themselves will also provide an opportunity for visible leadership

Against:

• It’s seen as a form filling chore by staff,  characterised by the example of offshore workers filling in a stack of cards to complete their quota just before boarding the helicopter to end their rotation
• The quality of observations is poor and doesn’t provide any insight into trends that need to be addressed.
• Overwhelming number of personal safety, and specifically PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) related observations and unsafe conditions are ignored.
• Cards are filled in but the conversations don’t always take place
• As metrics they are flawed because the rely on the whim of individuals to decide to make observations or not so they cannot be used as indicators of overall safety

My experience is that adoption and use of safety observation cards is varied, even between sites within the same organisation.  This variation ranges from a visible notice showing everyone the number cards received by department that week to plants where the cards and the dropbox beneath are gathering dust.  In my view:

• Targets can be used to address a chronic situation as they will switch people on to thinking about safety in their daily work, but once chronic underperformance has been managed the focus should switch from individual quotas to quality observations and the quality of the conversations and actions taken.

• Wherever targets are used, the target cannot be so large that it becomes impossible to address each and every card submitted.  Each submitted card provides information, good, bad or indifferent, that can be used to tailor safety improvement actions

However the data is used, the most important features of safety observation cards are the conversations and actions taken from observations and the cultural implication that safety is everyone’s responsibility.