The Client and Its Challenge
This railroad maintenance company faced a growing number of employee injuries. Isolated teams across the United States and Canada and high employee turnover made implementing and maintaining a meaningful safety program difficult. The company needed a program that would be effective with remote teams and could be quickly adopted without extensive training by new crew members.

The Risk Consulting Solution
The client engaged Marsh to implement a behavior-based safety program that relied on positive reinforcement as a way to manage employees’ safe behaviors. Marsh’s Behavioral Risk Improvement (BRI) process focused on using positive consequences and growing the team’s “percent-safe” score.

The client’s program targeted three injury categories: mounting and dismounting the train, slips/trips/falls, and lifting and back injuries. One or two employees from each crew were brought together to create the core BRI team. The core teams were trained on the BRI process with a focus on how to observe crew behaviors at work, recognize desired/safe behaviors, record events on the team’s individual scorecard, provide positive reinforcement regularly, and calculate the team’s percent-safe score.

Despite the company’s widely dispersed employee base, all company managers, supervisors, and crew chiefs were trained on the BRI process as well as on how to support the program. To put the behavior-based safety program into action, one person was chosen from each crew to support and administer the BRI process full-time. In addition to conducting orientation sessions for remaining crew team members, this employee is responsible for regularly observing core team members’ behaviors and reinforcing them, creating a system of checks and balances to ensure that the program continued to be reinforced at all levels.

Results
As a result of the Marsh BRI process, crew safety scores rose significantly. For five of the seven work groups, the percent-safe observations were in the 80 to 100 percent range in all three injury categories. Since the inception of the BRI program, the client reduced “recordables” as defined by OSHA by 51 percent. The program structure and BRI process itself has ensured that each work crew has an ongoing safety program no matter how remote its location.