A Programme Run with the CIA for Responsible Care:

An Introduction to Behaviours & Risk

Many companies recognise the need to move beyond current risk programmes and address cultural and management factors contributing to risk in order to make the workplace a safer and more resilient environment for their employees. With the continuing expansion of the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda the CIA is pleased to announce a pioneering initiative which is designed to improve the Responsible Care programme.

The programme proposed aims to help CIA members move to the forefront in adopting pro-active approaches to risk in the workplace. The approach looks at how workplace behaviours, management style and organisational culture contribute to business performance.

Until now, behavioural issues have been difficult to measure. Penumbra’s Eclipse programme, through use of the Behaviour Questionnaire©, allows us to measure up to 400 business behaviours and examine how they contribute to risk. Everyday language is used that people understand and can act on.

This is an opportunity for our members to engage with an innovative, validated approach to dealing with performance in the workplace, and in this case EH&S performance.

Why Behaviour?

It is what we do in the workplace that affects our performance. Not words or personality, but actions. Safety is directly affected by behaviours not only of operators, but also by supervisory staff and management. Increasingly investigations into safety incidents highlight issues such as management failings or organisation culture factors. These are what we are now looking to measure and assess with your participation in the Eclipse programme.

Experience of working with behaviours shows that that there are strong correlations between behaviour and other dependent variables in business. In the Eclipse programme we are looking for the correlations with the performance variables: Risk Incidents and Near Misses.

This programme aims to identify for each client those behaviours which correlate with good performance, as well as those that correlate with low performance, or risk incidents and near misses. In this way we hope to further the cause of Responsible Care using hard data rather than supposition and guess work.

What Behaviour?

What we do in the workplace is not limited to procedural or process based behaviour, but also the way in which we act and behave with our colleagues throughout the organisation. We all use behaviours that focus on Actions, People and Systems, and the survey measures behaviours that are common across all sectors and all organisations.

The behaviours measured are not ‘good’ or ’bad’, but they are objective having been assessed by over 5,000 people in many different organisations. More than 10,000 people have undergone the survey so far, looking at many different aspects of performance in their businesses. it is clear that here is no one ‘set’ of optimal behaviours for every situation, as behaviour is highly situational.

The advantage of this tool is that it provides our sector with the ability to look into how management and workplace behaviours impact on real performance. From this we hope to be able to find some real insights for our members as well as for the sector as a whole.

The Programme

The programme is delivered electronically and is easy to use. There is a questionnaire which is split into two parts with each taking around 30 minutes to complete. It asks each individual first what they currently do in their job and then secondly it asks what they consider they should be doing to perform better. Each company also submits their own Risk data in terms of incident numbers and near misses, in order that statistical analysis can be applied and meaningful correlations for them can be derived. All data is strictly confidential and is not divulged to any other parties except anonymously in tabular results.

This combination of primary research with the audit of existing safety and risk data, aims to give a much clearer idea of where participants stand in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

Recommendations and results are presented to users about their own performance. These can then be delivered to companies at aggregated levels, showing correlations between behaviours that define low or high risk of incidents.

This is the key part of the programme as it gives companies a very real and clear agenda for change, with guidance that people understand and can act on in a pragmatic way, both as individuals and at unit, division or company level.

A follow up survey is then carried out after a few months to monitor the progress at the individual and organisational level. This shows how well the change in behaviours has been made. It will give companies a clear idea of where they need to pay more attention.