(48ab) Managing Behavior Change: Key to Emergency Preparedness

During the past 10 years, large improvements in safety have been achieved through improved hardware and design, and through improved safety management systems and procedures. However, the industry's safety performance has leveled out with little significant change being achieved during the past few years because the behavior and human factor management is inconsistent at all levels in organization. This is widely recognized as having an important effect on accident causation and accident prevention.
Our Proposal: Introducing behavioral change at the design stage
Moving one step ahead in behavior change direction we propose a systematic algorithm which can be followed in order to enter this change into the business from design stage. Based on history analysis and lesson learnt from previous experience, one should prioritize the area which requires the highest importance to be looked upon first. After that follows a design stage where each and every member of organization should be involved directly/indirectly keeping good behavioral practices into consideration. We suggest that behavioral change should not be limited up to human resources only. It should also include Organization Response, Response Procedure, Govt. and Public Relation, and Technology also.
Naturally, changing behaviors is not easy nor a quick fix to improve safety performance. People need the time and space in their work schedules to be able to work on the changes. It will take time for benefits to show through as measurable changes in lagging performance measures.
Finally the idea is culminated by a HSE culture Ladder which is used as a tool for assessing one's standpoint at a very primitive but holistic level. The ladder encompassing 20 different HSE elements comprises of five generic conditions one extreme depicting a pathological case while other conveying a near ideal scenario.