The three C’s of Behaviors
In full disclosure, I am not a behavior specialist or a psychologist, just a safety professional who has spent the last 30+ years studying human behaviors. This 3-C model attempts to demonstrate how workers go from the CONCERNED state, the first of the C’s, to the CONFIDENT state, the last of the C’s. I have no scientific studies to validate my model, but I think most of us can follow and relate to this model. One day, I hope one of my “friends in safety,” working on their Ph.D. in safety-related sciences, will validate my model. So here we go…
Scenario:
Mary gets a job at a manufacturing facility. This is Mary’s first time working in this industrial setting and around large machinery. The facility has a written safety program from its insurance carrier; it sits on a shelf in a manager’s office and gets very little – almost zero use. The manual has a “safety orientation” checklist on the topics to be covered, but the business found it too time-consuming years ago, and no one wanted to step up and do the training. So it ended – never to be done again.
Mary gets “on-the-job” training from Bryan. Bryan has been at the facility for five years and is one of the “top workers” at the facility. Bryan has earned this recognition because “he gets things done” and has never reported an injury. So Bryan was chosen as the “onboarding” leader for the facility. He is a “mentor” to the new employees.
Mary and Bryan met in the conference room to meet and talk about the facility and what her department does at the facility. After a few minutes, Mary and Bryan venture into the department where she will work – following Bryan closely. She begins to take in all of the CONCERNS she is recognizing. The workplace is LOUD, HOT, DUSTY; many forklifts buzz around corners of where they are walking (of course, Bryan leans over and tells her to “watch out for those forklifts – but because of the noise, she just smiles as if she heard him). They walk through a door, and on the door, she reads two signs:
- Hearing protection required
- Eye protection required
She wonders why she has neither, but when she gets through the door, as Bryan begins his “welcome to your department speech,” she sees two containers labeled “safety glasses” and “hearing protection.” Still, she is puzzled to see they are empty, besides the layer of dust that had collected over the years.
Bryan says nothing about the PPE, so she goes along. After all, Bryan is the expert in training her, so if he does not need it, then “I guess it’s OK” – maybe the signs were needed before, but not now?
Bryan walks over to the machine that Mary will be interacting with. This is a very large, loud, and dusty machine with all kinds of moving, large, and fast-moving parts – but it’s OK; most of them are “covered.” Bryan shows Mary how the parts exit the machine and how he wants Mary to pick up the parts, inspect them for any “obvious flaws” (remember – Mary has no idea what a flaw would look like), and then put the part into a box.
As Bryan is demonstrating the task, the machine jams up. Bryan comments… “This happens often; let me show you how to fix it.” He walks over to a door and opens it, sticking his arm into the machine to reach the jammed packaging. Mary witnesses this and notices he is sticking his hand and arm between moving parts, some large and slow but some small but fast, to clear the jam. Mary is CONCERNED, rightfully so!
She has no idea there is a safety program (in that manual in the managers’ office) called Lockout/Tagout. She has never worked in this facility and received no safety training to make her skilled at Lockout/Tagout. She watches Bryan perform this jam-clearing task several times and cringes each time. At this point in her transition, her CONCERN is such that she has not even realized that, at some point, she will be the one sticking her hand and harm into that machine to clear the jam.
After 30 minutes or so of Bryan demonstrating how to do the planned task, Bryan observes Mary for 15 minutes. He says, “You got it,” and tells Mary that if she needs anything to page him over the intercom system (of course, she has no idea how to use it), and she nods OK and smiles.
Not long after Bryan leaves her, the machine jams up again. Then it dawns on her that she has to unclear the jam as “she was trained.” But she is very CONCERNED about performing this task. She begins to rationalize that “Bryan would not have shown me how to do something dangerous,” and he did it without hesitation, and he had all of his fingers when we shook hands less than an hour ago. But something inside her tells her, “This is not right” (common in the CONCERNED stage – it is our built-in risk evaluator). Mary could not bring herself to do it, so she tried to page Bryan over the intercom but couldn’t figure out how to use it. She finds another employee who agrees to help find Bryan. Fifteen minutes later, Bryan and Mary are back at the machine, and Bryan explains to her that the digital sign on the wall behind the machine is the parts counter, and she is now 100 parts behind schedule (numbers are red now) because she did not clear the jam as he had shown her. He walks over, opens the door, and demonstrates how to clear the jam again. Mary cringes again – but now she is well aware that she will be clearing jams.
Bryan departs, Mary resumes working, and the machine jams again minutes later. Mary goes to the machine’s door, opens it, and feels the heat and dust hit her in the face, and the noise is deafening. That little voice tells her, “I wouldn’t do it.” So Mary, using her intellect, decides I can make the heat, noise, dust, and all the moving parts disappear if I turn off the machine. It will only take a few seconds, and I can clear the jam. Mary hits the off button, hears this piercing alarm, and notices that the red strobe light on top of the machine is now flashing. Within seconds, workers arrive at the machine, asking what happened and why the machine is down. Mary explains her rationale and notices the workers all have these weird expressions. Then Bryan arrives and has a bit of an attitude because this is the second time he has had to stop what he was doing and come to help Mary, and he lets her know that she may not “work out in this job” if she continues to cause the machine’s parts counter to be in the red. He then scolded her for not doing as instructed and wanted to hear nothing of her CONCERNS. She would be out if she could not do this job as instructed. Bryan and the responding personnel start the machine, showing Mary all the waste she had created by her decision to stop the machine to clear the jam.
Later that day, Mary is faced with another jam. After her previous behavioral conditioning from hitting the stop button, she does exactly what that voice tells her not to do – what her “mentor” and “on-the-job trainer” told her. And low and behold (with much luck), she clears the jam just as shown. Mary is well on her way to the COMFORT state.
Weeks pass by…
Still performing the same task, Mary has now cleared hundreds, maybe thousands of jams with the machine running. That little voice of reason that she heard in the CONCERNED state is no longer talking to her. She has entered the COMFORT state. She is 100% COMFORTABLE with performing that crazy, unsafe act (no longer viewed as such by Mary in this COMFORT state) because she has received the desired outcomes of her actions:
1) Her parts counter is always ahead of schedule
2) Bryan is always recognizing Mary to her peers for always being over-target production
3) She can still remember the feeling of the day Bryan was walking by and observed her in the machine clearing a jam just as he had shown her and gave her a high-five and praise (now he is telling her, You may have a career here (rather than “you may not make it here”)
Months pass by…
The facility hires a new worker. Mary, being such a valued team member for all of her hard work, gets promoted to “mentor” and “OJT trainer.” And since the new employee will be doing Mary’s job on the 3rd shift, Mary’s first student will learn the job Mary learned mere months prior. Mary is now viewed as a “safe and productive worker” as she is a “get things done” kind of worker and has set production records without an injury.
So Mary trains Mindy the same way she was trained; after all, look at how well she turned out. Mindy is exactly like Mary on her first day. CONCERNED! She had never worked in a manufacturing environment and was overwhelmed by the noise, heat, dust, forklifts buzzing around, etc. Mindy also can read and begins to wonder why no one pays attention to the safety signs around the facility. Mindy goes through the same CONCERNS Mary had on her first days/weeks.
Then, one night, with very few people around (3rd shift), Mindy gets pulled into the machine and dies in a tragic accident. Workers are informed of the news as they come to work that morning.
What are Bryan and Mary’s reactions to the news?
They both believe “this would not have happened if she had just done the job as she was shown.” Of course, Bryan and Mary have no clue how Mindy was doing the job – they just know Mindy was killed in the same area of all the jams they have cleared over the months/years they have worked there. It is a built-in mental filter we have – we NEVER want to envision something like that happening to us, so we go into the mode of “it will never happen to me.” And now Bryan and Mary have demonstrated they are in the CONFIDENT state – the most dangerous state a worker can be in. In the CONFIDENT state, we can not even begin to see the error of our ways, as we have been conditioned, very powerfully, I might add, that our unsafe behaviors are correct as they produce our desired outcomes.
By the time we have a workforce in this CONFIDENT state (and it will happen to darn near every worker) and management then realizes after the multi-million dollar fine from a regulator that things need to change – it may be too late. It matters not the color of the cape on the back of the safety professional who swoops in to save the day, trying to overcome this CONFIDENT state, with the workers knowing that this training is not how management wants the facility run. After all, the first question we get from the workers is,
“Are they going to remove the big counter signs from over our machines? Because if you want me to do all this lockout bullshit, my counting sign on my machine will stay red, and I will have my supervisor riding my ass every day… hell, I may even lose my job, but for sure, my bonus”.
And you know what? They are correct most of the time. The company is only training on LOTO because of the settlement agreement with the regulator. They need a sign-in sheet(s) showing all employees received the 30-minute training on LOTO. Now we have entered the MANAGEMENT CONFIDENT state, which means everyone has lost their sense of risk, and the entire organization makes statements like:
“We know how to run our business better than ___________.”
“Those government safety people have no idea of our safety or risks.”
“Just look at Bryan, Mary, Bob, and Mike; they have been out here for years, and they set production records without getting even a splinter – we feel sorry for Mindy, but it was her fault.”
Unfortunately, this fairy tale has no happy ending, as it lives in millions of workplaces around the globe. For some workers and workplaces, the transition from CONCERN to COMFORT to CONFIDENT can take days; for others with some level of safety, it may take months or years to reach the CONFIDENT state. But this I can guarantee to anyone who wants to listen… we are all on that journey to the CONFIDENT state at work and at play, and the only thing standing in our way is a safety professional who cares and has the opportunity to make a difference. The things we teach at work, whether you’re a one-person act and you spend your time out in the facility building relationship and engaging the workforce with a positive safety message, or you’re the head of a global business trying to build a safety management system to ensure there are adequate barriers to prevent workers and management from getting to the CONFIDENT state – we do it for ONE REASON. The people we have the privilege to protect!
