Simpson’s Behavior Based
Safety Process at Korbel
Winner of the 1997 Forest Products Safety
Conference Award
Simpson Korbel Sawmill,
Korbel, California
At the Forest Products Safety Conference
awards banquet in Portland, Oregon on May 16,
1997, Simpson’s Korbel Sawmill was awarded
the first place safety award for large sawmills
with over 500,000 man hours worked per year.
Simpson’s sawmill had no lost time
injuries in four consecutive years.
The Behavior Based Safety Process implemented
at Korbel Sawmill was based on work done by Dr.
Thomas Krause, Ph.D. and Dr. John Hindley, M.D.
described in their book, The Behavior Based
Safety Process. The system presented by these
authors was customized for Korbel Sawmill and
includes the following steps:
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Observations, interviews with employees,
and analyses are made of each job in the
sawmill to determine what safety risks
are associated with each operation.
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Written procedures are developed to
reflect the appropriate steps that should
be taken to control exposure to injury
for each of the identified risks.
-
Safety observers are trained to observe
employees, analyze their behaviors as
compared to the written procedures, and
record any deviations.
-
The safety observers hold a conference
with the observed employee and discuss
any noted deviations, explaining the
safety risk.
-
The observation cycle continues.
Suggestions for improving the procedures
may emerge from the conference. In this
case, the improvement suggestion is
referred to the safety committee.
The following information was derived from an
interview with Randy Robertson, Employee
Development Administrator, who was given the
responsibility for implementing Korbel
Sawmill’s Behavior Based Safety Process.
Measuring Safety Performance
The Korbel Sawmill produces about 150 million
board feet of lumber a year (70% Redwood, 30%
Douglas Fir) with an average log size of about 88
board feet per log. Our 240 employees work over
500,000 man-hours each year. So not only are we
working a lot of man-hours, but we are handling a
lot of logs and producing a lot of lumber. The
risk of injury in a high volume sawmill such as
this is very high. The amazing thing is the
Korbel team has cut safety costs 93% since moving
to a Behavior Based Safety Process. We have not
had a lost time injury in four years.
To our knowledge this safety performance
record is among the very best in the industry: no
incidents where employees have lost time away
from the job in four years. Not one sliver where
it required a stitch, or a prescription, or a
strained back. Nothing that caused time away from
the plant. Nothing!! And we record everything. We
encourage all employee’s to write it down,
to let us know whenever there’s any kind of
sprain, strain, pull, everything regarding
safety. That way they won’t hide anything;
there’s absolutely no hidden injuries. Some
companies hide injuries to keep their incident
rate low. There is no encouraging people not to
report here. We tell people, "You report it,
you let us know." As an example, let’s
say I strained my back a little bit but it’s
not bad enough to go home. That becomes a simple
recordable incident but not part of your incident
rate. Just simply recording means that
you’ve written it down in the OSHA log and
said, "O.K. look. Here’s an employee
that’s reported he got a sore back because
he moved a 6x6, but he didn’t have to go to
the doctor." We may have iced it right on
the plant site, and he’s fine. He went right
back to work, and it’s no problem. So when
we talk about the incident rate we mean lost time
away from the plant site. The lost time
incident rate at our Korbel Sawmill has been 0.00
for four consecutive years!!
Organizing for Success
How was the mill organized to bring in this new
process? We have a separate supervisor for safety
but as far as the Behavior Based Safety Process
is concerned the training and development was
organized in an unorthodox manner. Frequently
safety programs are organized around recording
standard information after someone gets hurt. Our
management felt that because this new safety
approach would be largely a people process and
not a traditional report-based way of doing
business, it would take somebody with strong
people skills to train the employees. They would
need a strong ability to communicate and to teach
communication skills to the safety observers. So
management decided to put this project to develop
the Behavior Based Safety Process under the Human
Resources department and not under Safety.
Behavior Based Safety Training
If you are going to be effective a big commitment
from the company is required. We trained our
employees in teams, and we gave every employee
four hours of Behavior Based Safety training
initially. Since then we’ve repeated the
training each of the next three years. Every
employee has received at least four hours of
training every year. This allows everyone to stay
up-dated and familiar with the process.
We’ve probably trained every employee an
average of 16 hours and the observers well over
100 hours each during that four year period.
As of July 1997 we have had nearly 100 of our
240 employees complete the training to become
observers. We developed this training process
internally. We knew that we were on the right
track, so we chose not to have a consultant from
outside come in like a lot of companies do. We
did it ourselves.
Reading and Communication Skills Vital
for a Successful Safety Program
The key to a successful Behavior Based Safety
Process is the enthusiastic participation of all
employees. For this to happen, employees need to
have mastered the reading and communication
skills required to succeed in the training and in
the implementation of the safety process. Prior
to beginning our Behavior Based Safety Process,
we had offered the Read Right
English acquisition program to our Hispanic and
Portuguese workers (15-20% of the workforce) and
the Read Right reading
improvement program to all our employees. We
chose Read Right because a
Simpson benchmarking study and pilot run found it
was the most effective reading and English as a
Second Language (ESL)
program available, and we were interested in a
fast, proven program to help our employees. Read Right cuts the time required
to eliminate reading problems by 91%. If we had
used some other literacy program, our employees
would not have solved their reading or English
language problems in time for our Behavior Based
Safety training.
Many of our present safety observers
couldn’t read well or couldn’t
communicate well in English before they went
through Read Right training
in 1991 and 1992. These men couldn’t have
been observers if they hadn’t gone through Read Right. It not only gave them
the skills they needed to successfully complete
the training and to read and understand the
procedures, it gave them the self confidence and
self esteem to volunteer and do the job well. If
you don’t have people with basic skills in
place this process of Behavior Based Safety
Training will not succeed very well.
If I Had It To Do Again. . .
It’s worked extremely well. We have a very
people oriented operation going on here at Korbel
with a very high level of employee participation.
It’s magnificent what we’ve been able
to accomplish. If I were to set up a Behavior
Based Safety Process in a new plant, I would go through the same sequence again. I
would solve the reading and the English
communication problems first, using Read Right because of the fast
results. This would build up the employees’
skills and self confidence and broaden the number
of employees willing to help. Then I would move
into the safety process work and the training
required to implement it. People have to have the
skills first, and you need a lot of people
involved. If you only have ten people out there
doing safety observations that’s not enough,
and the employees being observed will feel much
less threatened and more a part of the whole
safety effort if they can read and understand the
procedures. If you use only the employees who
start out with adequate communication and reading
skills you are not going to have enough observers
to get a good sample of what’s going on the
mill floor. And you will be wasting a valuable
resource in the people who need a little help to
get up to speed. In our case 23 of our safety
observers improved their reading skills and/or
English skills before volunteering to help with
safety. They couldn’t have helped us with
our safety process if we hadn’t helped them
first.
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