hi everybody my name is dr. John Austin and I'm here to talk to you about organizational behavior management also known as OPM my background is in behavior analysis I spent time at Florida State sounds like I spent time in you know Folsom County it was really good at Florida State and I worked with John Bailey there in grad school got my PhD in behavior analysis and then I spent 15 years at western michigan university teaching behavior analysis and OBM applied behavior analysis and variety of course is there after that I spent some tough questions and so for the past eight to ten years I've been working on my own business project called reaching results where I my my purpose is to help leaders create safer and more effective work environments so today we're going to talk about OPM we're gonna we're gonna go through a little bit of the history what is OBM and we'll cover a few key studies and some some offer some resources for you to be able to to look up if you'd like to learn more about it so OPM really is the application of applied behavior analysis principles to organizational problems and challenges whatever those might be and it's been applied very widely over the years and I'll try to demonstrate that during the talk but in general really here we're talking about creating better work environments that help people reach their potential and improve business results in practice this is typically done through engaging leaders and co-workers to create a motivating environment it's all about I mean I think that the if we were to talk generally about what OPM takes from applied behavior analysis and behavioral thinking it's crickets that Indre environments drive behavior and so what we're talking about doing is creating environments that drive the kinds of behavior that the the workers want and that the leaders want in the Muniz Asian that the organization needs OPM scientists study the effects of these same tools in the field and lab settings using experimental research and I'll point out later and a little bit more detail that that's part of what sets OPM apart from other pursuits in organizational psychology yeah so like the behavioral elements lead to lots of experimental research as opposed to correlational research and stuff the field is very pragmatic and it's more pragmatic than theoretical meaning the whole purpose of the field really began as writing down tech tools and techniques and in you know in a usable format for leaders so what do we know about behavior and how can leaders use it really is what the field is about so there's a there's a science of OBM and there's a practice of OBM and they're they're really always has been I think the practice really started first and then the science kind of caught up with it adding a journal and and and academic programs and stuff like that but in practice what OBM consultants or practitioners teach leaders are things like observing behavior and this sounds very simple but in the mainstream that's not usually what's taught in leadership right if you pick up a standard leadership book text or popular book from the popular press if it's not really based in behavioral science firmly it will not refer to behaviors it'll be more likely to refer to personality and traits and and things that are really difficult to observe and measure and stuff so like one of the real strengths here and the most powerful features of OBM and its practice is to teach leaders how to observe what people say and do really carefully and that has great power because it allows you to to make decisions based on data as opposed to opinion we also teach leaders to understand the causes of work problems and remove barriers it's not uncommon for for me to encounter a leader who you know has a poor an employee who's not doing what the leader wants them to do or what their what their expectations are for the job and so wants to fire the person before they really understand what it is that's driving the person's behavior right so it could be well there's one story that's from a client that that illustrates this where they had a series of contractors who were coming on to site and what they wanted them to do was to sign in when they got when they got to site to the site and and they needed to use this computer system to sign in and they found that none of the contractors were signing in and so they were like these guys are lazy right and that was the kind of typical thought there and then so you know as part of the course that I was teaching them you know this understanding the causes came up and it's like well okay so why don't you go collect some data well I have none of them sign it okay have you asked any of them why they haven't signed it okay I'll do that so they go and they come back and they come back and they like yeah they don't have a password so you know I mean that's that's just how many of these problems end up there the solutions are not mammoth you know the solutions are typically very simple but it requires some effort and some understanding of behavior in order to get to them so understanding the causes of work problems is a big part of what we do and you know just like applied behavior analysis the term analysis is in there for a reason it's it's not merely applying solutions that we think might work it's understanding the situation and then applying the appropriate solution so we also teach education and training we teach people and supervisors and leaders managers to to agree with their staff on expectations and actually this is you know broadly studied there's some Harvard Business Review articles that came out recently that said last fifty years this is one of the things that leaders have the most trouble with is something as simple as agreeing on expectations and making them behavioral giving feedback receiving feedback using incentives reinforcement praise and adding that there are people in the field like Aubrey Daniels and associates who are you know famous for pointing out since the seven early 70s that work environments are devoid of positive reinforcement by large many work environments are run on punishment and coercion and stuff like that and so you know Aubrey Daniels and his his team have tirelessly taught people for 40 years how to deliver reinforcement and praise and to use that and it's a it's a magnificent tool and the research bears it out as well so compared to other management and leadership approaches OPM is behavioral experimental and evidence-based it operates under the seven principle principles of applied behavior analysis as well according to bear wolf and grizzly 1968 so it's it's firmly a part of applied behavior analysis so I want to talk a little bit about the where it came from and what the guiding scientific models are here in OPM the the the primary guiding model is the ABC model which shows that behavior is a function of antecedents and consequences that is stuff that comes before it and stuff that comes after the behavior that's really what drives any given behavior at work at home in other settings doesn't matter really what the setting is it's just that the antecedents and consequences will change based on the the situation in the environment the context so solutions are either antecedent based like a lemon I'll show a study later in this talk building awareness so that might be an antecedent based solution it's typically not as effective as consequence based solutions which might include like feedback and reinforcement or it could be both so you know it's i-i've said that its pragmatic OPM's pragmatic meaning that you know we really just want to find things that work and demonstrate that they work and help help people in business to provide better results because at the end of the day most people who are managers and leaders in business they may not know anything about applied behavior analysis and they really don't care whether it's applied behavior analysis or something else as long as it works yeah so like there's that pragmatic force but typically the stuff that works can you know comes from applied behavior analysis and thinking and it can be explained in terms of you know behavioral thinking so like having the model is really useful for coming up with other ideas that people might not have thought of the field has many names it turns out and because because OPM really was kind of the scientific name or the name of the science as it developed as practitioners we use different names and in fact when I when I'm doing practice work and consulting work I don't typically use the term OPM I'll often use the term just behavioral science or behavioral leadership or something like that and in in my work and safety it'll be behavioral safety leadership right and that's just because the terms typically are more acceptable to the people the audience right so like the terms change but some of them have been include performance management which by the way if you google performance management what you'll find is an HR strategy for managing performance that really is closer to like performance review yeah and it's not referring to this field at all but all breed annuals international really coined the term performance management a wrote a great book on this topic which I'll recommend later and that's a different than performance review organizational behavior modification or OB mod and you can understand why we don't use that term much anymore performance engineering which was coined by Tom Gilbert in the 60s performance analysis behavioral leadership behavioral science and business behavior management techniques and in fact their subfields in OBM focused on safety and and that's known as behavior-based safety in fact that's probably the in in manufacturing and probably construction and Industry heavy industry BBS or behavior-based safety is probably the most well known version of OPM but we also call it behavioural safety leadership in those in those cases but the that you know when it's when it's directed its safety this is this is this is using the same techniques and dedicating them to creating safer work environments so some of the origins where did this come from I looked back at like in preparation for this talk and and found that that really this was happening there were organizational applications arguably before the 50s and 60s but but people who are who are well known in our field were active in the late 50s and 60s and it really mostly emanated from Harvard and it was people like Dale breath our and Tom Gilbert who went to study with Skinner in various capacities and encountered Holland and Markel and Herrnstein and there and Ament and Holland and Markel's work in programmed instruction really is kind of where this started and and there's another there's another element that most people up Dale brought our for example would point to and that is in the in 1959 Ione and Michael published a really very well-known study called psychiatric nurses behavior engineer and and what they what they showed in that study in 1959 was in a in a mental health facility there were nurses who were who were who were experimenting with and Ione and Michael helped them experiment with I should say behavioral techniques to change the behavior of patients in that hospital and so you know there were a series of studies a series of experiments in that if you haven't looked taking a look at this it's a fantastic article just to demonstrate in a really simple way what staff can do to impact the the behavior of of patients in a hospital and you know I think before this it was you know medication was was the main option right and management it but it wasn't really changing behavior and so so the the the insight here I think for OBM is that you can teach staff to manage behavior and so like I own and Michael where coaches effectively to the psychiatric nurses and so that the the data that I'm showing here are are data from one of the experiments where they had you know the nurses had had a challenge with a patient who entered their office and disrupted things and and when they started was like sixteen times a day right so it was happening often and so I own and Michael coached this nurse to use extinction effectively to ignore the patient when they came in like and so the instructions were very clear was like do not make eye contact do not speak to the patient when they walk in your office act act as though they're not there right and so you can see in the data it went from 16 down to close to near zero right over a matter of weeks so highly effective you know we we know this now it's kind of second hand right but like it was a great experiment demonstrating the power of coaching a staff member to behave in a certain way and then influence the people they interact with right so like a lot of people see this as the first OPM study and I'm sure that in other other areas and apply behavior analysis they also claim this study for you know the the origins of their field but it was 1959 and there weren't many outlets for publications of work of this this sort so so that was one of the early studies and it came from these innovators really creating an environment where people could could do studies like this and so specifically I just wanted to talk about some of the early you know some of the innovators in the field and Dale breath our was one of them and preparation for the talk I had some communications with Dale and and worked I had the pleasure of working with him for years at Western Michigan University as well but but more recently I just wanted to kind of confirm some facts you know and and there's a great memoriam that awed Linsley wrote about Tom Gilbert and that put some other pieces together and and it turns out they were both at Harvard and Gilbert showed up for for a postdoc with Skinner and Skinner was like in England and so in in linz Li's memoriam he he recounts that interaction like Gilbert was like what he's not here I'm getting in my car and leaving you know and was it was I no no no stay please you know because they're things that we're gonna do we're gonna go to Pigeon Lab we're gonna talk to her and Steen we're gonna work with you know Holland and Markel and they're doing interesting work and so Gilbert stayed and then and then eventually trained Rummler and so like these three guys really got together and performed the early the earliest applications of OBM and then they started or were formative I guess in the early stages of the NASA National Society for program instruction n SPI which became ISPI the International Society for performance improvement like totally not related to Abba in any way but these guys came from that that tradition and then applied their work there and I think each of them was president at a different time in ISPI if I'm not mistaken I know I know breath our and Gilbert work and then breath our started to Dale breath our started teaching courses in in the late 60s at University of Michigan and and I can kind of confirm this with dickham a lot too where you know when Dale moved to another location he gave these courses in OPM over to dickham a lot who started teaching them for leaders in at U of M and in the early 70s and along you know kind of concordant with that in another location Arbor Daniels started behavioral Systems Incorporated in 1972 and these folks really had the traditions of ABA or pipe the Association for behavior analysis and so they came to that conference in you know trained people in that kind of tradition which was really different than the tradition of ISPI and that led to the the program at Western University on OPM which was one of the first if not the first that was specifically focused on OPM there's another tradition and a lot of people don't know about and that was this is the one that I learned from first it turns out and that's Lou Thesz and Crichton ER and they published a book in 1975 and they some articles are slightly earlier than that and their tradition really was in business and management and so they they worked out of Academy of Management so there really were like three different academic associations involved with this with this development and then from from Lou Thesz and Crichton errs work they developed the program at University of Notre Dame and that's where I got my undergraduate degree and so my the first book I ever read was not Aubrey Daniels which is is really the the most formative text in the in the entire field instead it was loose ends and Crichton or Obi mod and it's a great book still and it's interesting how they formed kind of separately from from these others but some but it all links back to programmed instruction really so so I think I've already said is bi and ISPI and OBM are really separate now that although they came from the same roots and inside of I SPI what you've got is human performance technology so they're equivalent to OB M is called HP T and there are loads of people who are trained and certified and hbt now in fact they're there ten thousand or more that go to this the ISPI conference it's a big organization and and many of them are trained and certified in HP T and don't know anything about OB m at this point they've completely but they're using a lot of the same concepts because they're all based on breath hour and Rummler you know Gilbert and so is OPM but it kind of went different directions I think that's interesting and many of them don't talk and over the years and OB m we've made efforts to try to get them to kind of come together in dáil breath our was president of ISPI and he tried to bring them together but they just have different practices and different kind of theoretical roots in some sense but like they all go back to program history so there was that that programmed instruction link and and I just want to lay out some of the some of the assumptions in each of these to see how it kind of came together there so one of the assumptions or foundations is active student responding yeah it's also a focus on like designing the educational environment and that how that how much that matters and Sue Markel wrote a lot about this yeah and then immediate feedback and reinforcement and its impact on behavior of the learner so that was really important then you had behavioral systems analysis which was breath hour and Rummler and Gilbert really kind of coming together for that and and that's really that really involved understanding how behavior changes through systems analysis so one element is that systems evolve and behavior changes based on internal and external feedback loops so again we're back to feedback and so OBM really kind of sprouted out of that being the application of behavioral principles to individuals and groups at work and the earliest studies and even still today the most common solutions found in OPM science and practice involve feedback and reinforcement and you can see how they directly came from active student responding sorry from program instruction and behavioral systems analysis so another notable kind of early thing and this this relates to really the first very clearly obvious OPM study it wasn't really a study it was it was it was like a it was a popular press article was like in Newsweek I think was one of one of the articles but there were a number of articles about Edie Feeney and his work at at Emory air freight yeah and and Dale breath our taught him as an executive at University of Michigan so like like Edie Feeney comes to University of Michigan takes this course with Dale breath our and then applies it in his job saves like three million dollars it catches in 1970 ish around that time right and then by the early 70s there there tons of articles about like wait a minute feedback and reinforcement can save you millions of dollars at work right and so there it's just a great series of articles that you can look up that was like this groundbreaking this groundbreaking stuff which you know obviously Skinner had demonstrated since like the 30s right so lots of lots of magazine articles in the early 70s on reinforcement and Skinner's theories at work that kind of I think that and I own and Michael's work really led to Arbor Daniels teaming up with Fran Tarkenton who was a famous football player famous quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings and didn't I don't think didn't know anything about behavior he just wanted to start a business I think after his you know after his football career and and so Aubrey taught him about behavior and they put their heads together and started a business called behavior Systems Incorporated and that was that's one of the first consulting firms for sure so so you know there's lots of activity around this time in business and people are saving money and finding finding the utility of reinforcement of feedback at work which you know if you step back and we think about it now it's like duh right like of course people you know want to feel good about what they've accomplished and they want feedback on their performance and yet feedback and reinforcement is still lacking in most work environments or it could be it could be met it could be made better it could be it could be improved and it could be made higher quality and in just about every single organization that I've worked in thousands of leaders I've taught over the last just only ten years every single one of them could use it right so like it seems common sense but yet it it's it's not human nature to do it you've got to create the right environment for it so the science started then and so by 1977 you know some will say over 40 articles were published some will say over 100 articles were published it kind of depends on which articles you claim to be related to OBM but suffice it to say that there was a lot of work going on and there was no journal there was no dedicated journal for this work and so so what they did was start where they started this journalist called Jo BM Journal of organizational behavior management was started in 1977 by behavioral Systems Incorporated and Aubrey Daniels was the first editor this gave a direction and an outlet to the field so it could develop scientists and this was a kind of a critical juncture right so now training programs could could could direct their students research toward a certain journal they could read the journal and have it as part of course work and and curricula and stuff like that and now in 2018 we're in vol 38 of Jo BN I served a term as editor for Jo BM and and they're still going strong publishing lots of great work in the field and it's a wide variety of organizational applications it's some of the reviews that have been conducted show that most of it consists of experimental data and most of that data consists of field research so like its actual applications in actual organizations now there are there is like a growing field a growing series of lab studies that are being conducted and people are some people are conducting some translational research that takes takes an organizational challenge like let's see like delivering reinforcement or something like that or delivering praise brings it into the lab to study it and then and then makes recommendations for the you know for the practitioners and stuff so that's happening too but by and large most of the research still is applied research in organizations in field settings so consultants in this area practice in a variety of right a variety of domains I've listed just five of them here but there are probably 20 or 30 and the list is as long as business will allow really it just really depends on the language in which the organization speaks and the and opportunities that they're facing right so like but some of them are you know broadly construed as performance improvement leadership training and development safety culture change there are organizations like CLG that for a while focused primarily on mergers and acquisitions and merging cultures of two organizations right and so they were applying behavioral principles to help people you know change their behavior to align with the behavior of the new organizations culture right there other organ consulting firms who have focused primarily on you know when there's an IT or you know information technology computer based solution the biggest source of failure often is that people don't use the system rights do you spend like millions of dollars on the system and then no one wants to use it they're using the Excel instead like in secret you know and so like there there are companies that focus on changing people's behavior employees behaviors so that they readily adopt new solutions technology solutions right so like I mean it could be anything really if it involves people then OPM practitioners have probably worked there and are probably currently working there the in the science and the research studies the most common targets are productivity quality improvement customer satisfaction safety behavior training and education there's there many studies in each of these areas and and others too we serve a wide variety of industries I myself have worked in every one of these industries and it's not it's as a practitioner in OBM it's not hard to do because we really don't bring industry experience what we bring is is behavioral knowledge and we need to partner in practice with the individuals who know the industry who are working in that industry to help them understand the impact of behavior and the impact of their own behavior on the on the business they are the organization right so that's what we do and we do it in aviation construction education government health care Human Services all these different areas I would say that early studies and early applications were primarily targeted at factoring and and probably the reason was that there were the very stable environments right and like you could you could easily envision how changing some behavior in a manufacturing organization would like improve profits or improve productivity at Google it's a little harder because the the outputs are less tangible yeah so but believe me they haven't they have an entire behavioral science team that's applying a lot of these concepts at Google and lots of other you know technology companies in Silicon Valley and around the world so like this is really widely applicable as I said before so the the primary solutions that are used in OBM in this in the science almost well the vast majority of the scientific studies involve package interventions which means like putting a bunch of things together might be feedback reinforcement and task clarification or expectations setting or something like that so you put a bunch of things together to solve the problem and typically the effects are quite large they're they're so large that mostly we don't use statistical analysis we just use visual analysis and it's like yeah here's what here's productivity and then we did feedback and reinforcement and it went like that right and it's really obvious everybody's happy there's a you know immense behavior change and they you know typically save lots of money or make more money so some of these interventions involve and now well some of the techniques I suppose I should say involve analysis and I want to talk a little bit about that they might involve test clarification or expectations setting they might involve feedback reinforcement praise coaching incentives scorecards any variety of these combined even and and probably other things too certainly other things some of the recent work that I'm doing right now involves having supervisors have more frequent and more impactful conversations with their staff which sounds fluffy and light but in in in practice what it means is we're talking more and I have more opportunities to give you feedback and reinforcement really is what it comes down to in coaching right but you know in practice especially in manufacturing settings people don't really like to talk to one another they're just like I'm doing my job leave me alone right but the more but what we know is the more they talk to each other the better they get along the better the products are I think that happens across industry so so just a couple of examples of behavioral analysis the probably the most frequent widely used analysis is called ABC analysis and this involves kind of delineating looking at a specific behavior and then delineating the antecedents are the things that come before it and the consequences are the things that come after it and Petric wrote a wrote an article in journal of organizational behavior management on this topic and sort of like a demonstration article in the early the early 80s and then Aubrey Daniels really made it popular and and turned it into a bit of an acronym which they call picnic analysis and it's very easy to use and and picnic really just refers to the ratings of valence timing and likelihoods so like valence is positive or negative that's the p timing is immediate or future and likelihood excuse me likelihood is certain or uncertain so that's pick nick and it's it's spelled out really clearly in aubrey daniels books on performance management which i'll give you a citation to at the end there's there's also a different model and that's the behavior engineering model and that I think is somewhat less popular but but is still widely used in certain areas and and it really took the ABC model and combined it with two more like two levels or did did the ABC model at two levels the environment level and the performer level so if you wanted to think about this you could take any given performance and you could ask questions in a variety of these of these boxes that occur from this two by three matrix right so environment information and knowledge that's in the environment might be questions that you'd ask about information and feedback like is the performer getting adequate information or getting adequate feedback before the task in the you know from the workers perspective that means do I have the right knowledge and skills the resources and capacity in the environment might be do the PERT does the person have the right resources resources or tools and and the worker you look at the worker and that means you know do they have the capacity to perform the perform the job and so as you see you can kind of walk through and Gilbert really wrote out some questions that you could ask too and you can it's just a quick and dirty kind of informal assessment that you can conduct and then finally there was the performance diagnostic checklist or PDC that we spelled out in 1999 in JVM that was really kind of a combination of both of the earlier two that came before it with just a different way of asking the questions to get us a little bit closer to a true informant assessment from a ABA kind of perspective and so we we laid out questions about Anna Stephens in the work environment we laid out questions about equipment and process in the work environment the skills and abilities and the consequences that the performer might be or might not be experiencing and that you know the idea there is to answer yes or no to each of these questions and then that directs you toward a particular solution and it and we used it really successfully on a number of studies with novices in the field so like undergraduate students who had never worked in an organization could go find a target performance in an in a in a real business and ask the right questions and come up with an effective solution and implement it and make a big improvement and they and they wouldn't really have to know a lot about business or behavior really when it comes down to it with some coaching they were able to do that and we published a bunch of studies a bunch of like five or ten studies showing that in different environments so the other solutions pass clarification what what the research has pointed to in that is our specific getting very specific very behavioral and observable when it comes to setting expectations so a lot of times this means like writing it down making it a checklist making it something that is easily observed we also know that getting engagement from the performer produces better results so the in the modification days of the 60s it was probably a whole lot more common for a supervisor to tell you what the expectations are and then fire you if you don't do them right but now in these days you know we've found that it's a whole lot more effective to have a discussion about it gained commitment from the person and you know while you're doing that uncover any possible barriers to engaging in the performance and stuff like that and it's just a whole lot more common sense view but it's also bare doubt by the science feedback lots of studies on feedback showing massive effects in performance in lots of different industries on lots of different targets and what we know is that the more immediate the more behavioral the feedback is the more effective it is we also know that graphic verbal and written feedback and can have positive impacts graphic feedback is probably the most effective to show performance over time because it gives you something to reinforce when you see improvements there's good deal research on positive versus constructive feedback and and some data showing in a variety of different fields even showing that a ratio of positive hi ratio of positive comments to negative or constructive comments is more effective so like if you looked at the ratio of your own statements you'd want to you'd want to maintain a for positive statement to one constructive statement kind of ratio or better right that doesn't mean if you you know if you if you have eight positives you need to have two constructive could be eight to one and that's that's actually better so then finally reinforcement and praise and I kind of went through this already I think but that's those are highly highly focused on highly studied highly used techniques there there are there's an entire industry on coaching which I won't get into here lots of varied targets but typically it's a verbal discussion between a coach and coach and it involves all of the tools and techniques that I told you about earlier like behavioral observations some data collection database decision-making other ways that you can get feedback either verbally from your co-workers or by surveys and things like that and then a focus on results and like are things improving or not and if not you've got to adjust your behavior and try again so like a real focus on experimentation real focus on data and behavior if you've got those three elements you can make improvements in those settings there's an entire field of incentives people who have focused entirely on incentives which is beyond the scope of this this talk but you know this is this is the idea that when people are paid based on the achievement of results that drives that drives their behavior this is this is widely used in business but not widely understood very well and so in most of my client engagements that's not the first thing that I recommend people go going toward many people in the area of occupational safety for instance want to pay incentives for avoiding injuries and I think that's a terrible idea and the reason is that sometimes injuries are self-reported yeah and if I'm paid a few hundred bucks to not self-report I'm likely to not self-report right so you're gonna get like under reporting so you know you've got to really think through what you're trying to reinforce here with incentives but there are people in our field who know it really well and like Alice Dickinson has done a great whole series over the years of lab studies showing the impact of various types of incentive systems scorecards is another field that is is pretty widely widely acknowledged Albert Daniels has got a great set up on performance matrix in his performance management book you can look into that for more details there typically it's a summary of five to nine performance targets that's used for feedback purposes it can target behaviors or results or both it can target financial stuff can target just about any metric that you've got which is you know the good part about it again there are many ways to do this wrong and a few to do it right it's kind of complicated I think it can drive the wrong behavior in other words and does a lot of times if you haven't thought it through very well behavior-based safety I should say something about this because it's so common so prevalent the typical the typical approach that's been spelled out by Terry McSween and others he's got a great book on this called the values based safety process the process involves assessing injuries in some way and sort of figuring out the behavioral and can environmental determinants of the injuries putting those things on the checklist and developing a behavioral observation process teaching people to observe the behavior of each other coworkers or people who report to you and give verbal feedback and reinforcement based on like what you're seeing right it's lots of studies showing that this works or can work in the right environment and and not too many studies showing you know that it it sometimes doesn't work and and in practice we find this because you start to find like what are the critical success factors there are a few studies on that Scot Geller did a really nice study on critical success factors and what what the consulting experience kind of bears out and what the study that's that study kind of suggested was that the poor relationships between people in those environments can really reduce effects because like I'm gonna walk up to you and observe your behavior but you hate me and I hate you too and so how is that likely to go when I give you feedback you know so there's that and then the the other thing is that people in the field sometimes misunderstand the fact that this is all self-reported data and so they think that it's accurate and in many cases it's not trained to a level of accuracy and and and so we actually did a series of studies that that Alyssia alvaro termed the observer effect and we published these to show that it actually still has an impact even when it's inaccurate so the impact is if I'm an observer and I come and observe your behavior it actually changes my behavior when I go back to work which is an interesting it's kind of side effect that we didn't I'm sure that we didn't expect in doing these like I had done 50 or 60 implementations of behavior-based safety before it occurred to me that that was something that happens you know so like because we're very focused on changing the behavior the person who's receiving the observation not who's doing it so so there is that benefit even though the data are often inaccurate so just want to wrap up with just I want to talk about a few studies in the area and a few noteworthy books in the area these I've mentioned already all of the exception of actively caring for people so the first two really are focused on managing and leading performance management and then human competence by Thomas Gilbert performance management the newest versions Aubrey Daniels and John Bailey there he's Albury has had many versions over the years I used many of them different ones in my courses and it's it's like the go to text when it comes to teaching a course a basic course in in OBM performance management actively caring for people and the values based safety process are things that are focused on safety and so if you want to learn more about that they're both excellent texts on those topics value-based safety process is more of like a Hal to step by step and so it's a kind of a reference book I have a list of like 50 books that I give out routinely when people want to learn more about this I've limited this to four of left off seem some important stuff but like this would get you a pretty good knowledge of what's out there I wanted to end by talking about a few noteworthy studies in the area and I wanted to start with the first study that was published in the first issue of Journal of Journal of organizational behavior management Jay OPM and it was focused on industrial absenteeism and so this was like the lead article in 1977 it involves 7,500 production workers over four years the solution really was reinforcement and feedback it was it was they called it an attendance management system but really it was non-monetary reinforcers like small tangible reinforcers for attendance and progressive discipline for missed attendance so it was really like kind of a differential reinforcement program right so like if you if you if you came and you you you you were given tangible reinforcement and praise and if you didn't come then you were written up and after five steps you could be terminated and so like they had a variety of different reinforcers one of them was you don't have to punch in if you come for a certain period of time which the employees really liked they also were able to earn time off if they came on time and then finally which I thought was this is amusing I think you could like not be involved in the program if you were good enough right like we're just not even a focus on you because you're so good so you got an immunity from the program as a reinforcer and then the progressive discipline like I said could could end in termination and what they found were these massive effects of you know overtime that that you know showed that you know a huge reduction in absenteeism across two different plants so you had a multiple baseline design across four years of data with 7500 factory workers right so like really strong robust kind of data overtime unlikely to be caused by anything else here's another one that was by Gerry shook and colleagues when they were all at in Kalamazoo at Western Michigan University and this involved staff performance at at a psychiatric hospital and it so Human Services staff completely different from a manufacturing absenteeism study in industrial you know manufacturing and what they wanted to do was help the staff or encourage the staff to complete graphs on time and so part of their job was to update graphs of data collection on the the persons with disabilities who they were working with right and so but the staff didn't do that and so as you see in baseline it was zero percent and and so they provided some instruction on how to do this and got a little blip and in fact they ran a first experiment which I won't show you but it basically involved giving the staff instructions and reducing response effort which meant they basically partially completed the graphs for the staff and hung him up for them and then the graph had the the staff had to had to complete the graphs right so so that produced and in fact but it quickly trailed off over time right as we'd expect it to and so they ran experiment two and in Spearmint experiment two kind of did the same thing but then they added group and individual feedback in social reinforcement and so for the group feedback face they just showed the percentage of the group who had completed their graphs so no individual accountability really and that worked that kind of marginally got a marginal improvement and then they added the percentage each individual did of current graphs on a daily basis and you see that that doubled performance of tripled performance right so that individual feedback made a big difference and then they added a praise condition or they added praise to it at the end there where they they praised for 100 percent performance and they had a whole system really where they said you could become this was the 70s so they said you could become a cog in the machine and and cog cog was short for covert current overt Grapher so you could be a cog if you reach 80 percent for five days and you'll get lots of praise and you like your name goes on the wall and stuff like that but the reason one of the reason I picked this for several reasons one was because I loved Gerry shook in his work but secondly it's it's an early study and staff performance using OBM and then thirdly it demonstrates what a lot of OBM programs do these days and practice is they they create a whole system around it and so there was like a media campaign as it was like hanging up posters in the 70s now it's like maybe social media they name the campaigns oftentimes there's there's marketing associated with it right and so there are these like awareness components and motivational inspirational components that I don't think have been well studied yet but like are used widely and seem to be really effective right just a couple more studies and then I'll wrap up this one was in still a different setting and this was Chris Anderson was my first mentor in OPM and University of Notre Dame and what they focused on was cleaning and customer service in a hotel and and so they they went through a few different phases but the most important thing is that they created a checklist with observable behaviors on it and they taught supervisors to use the checklist to monitor cleaning in the hotel room and so this is one of the one of the first studies I read when I was learning about this and I remember distinctly Chris Anderson saying okay so we did a lot of studies measuring cleanliness in hotels and my advice to you is never sit on the bed cover you know for 25 years that's stick with that stuck with me and I'd never sit on the on the bed cover now so anyway what they did was they were able to improve cleaning by by measuring it and then I'm clarifying the test so they gave the individuals the checklist and helped them to understand what it was so first tell them what to do in really clear terms and this was not participative in any way it was just like hey this is what we want you to clean and we've got a checklist to demonstrate it and then it's we're gonna give you feedback on it so we gave you graphic feedback on the percentage of items that you cleaned as spot checked by your supervisor after you finish and then they implemented a token economy so when you reach certain levels you got points and those points were exchangeable for like items right that you could buy normally with money right and they got these massive improvements as you see during baseline it's super variable and by the end condition in each case each of the each of the groups across this multiple baseline it's near 100% and highly consistent right and and you may think well like that that's simple right it is in many ways but yet you could go into virtually any hotel today and you could probably find a baseline a baseline that looks a lot like this baseline did and you could use these same techniques to help them get to a hundred percent because they're probably not there it's just human nature if they're not creating the right environment they're not getting the behavior they want so I'm gonna skip this one and this one and on this one so Beth soldiers are off was is one of the leading figures in behavioural safety and she was the first one of the first to publish any studies on this which i think is it's notable in the seventies to have had best soldiers are off and another woman judy Komachi who's still doing great work as well both be the early adopters and the first to publish in these areas so I think it's it's pretty cool so I wanted to pick this study in particular Beth did many great studies and I was I was fortunate to study some with her she mentored me and we wrote an article together as well reviewing behavior-based safety but what she did here was to demonstrate what what I described to you earlier this behavior-based safety process and so what they did is in a factory of 225 employees they did an injury assessment they developed checklists that were of critical behaviors and by the way I'm just showing you one department here they did it across multiple departments each one had a different checklist because they had different hazards and risks they developed an observation process and then they implemented a changing criterion and multiple baseline design to to evaluate the impact of giving people feedback and reinforcement for achieving on these checklists and and then setting goals for each of them as well and so over time you see that performance went from 70 percent on average up to 85 percent or so and and it was very systematic and it was not punitive it's not coercive to my knowledge no one was fired they use positive reinforcement they used feedback and then they saved money and interestingly they reported in this in the small factory fifty five thousand dollars in savings which is around one hundred and seven thousand dollars in two thousand eight eighteen money which for a single factory of two hundred twenty-five people is significant I mean like that would show up for sure it's not a rounding error at all so like important injuries injuries didn't go down injuries looks like look like maybe they increased and I think they'd attribute that to creating a more positive environment maybe more people reported injuries but the severity of injuries went down and the behavior clearly changed right so like over time you'd expect to see more significant injury reduction stuff there so a really cool study that's kind of you know exemplary of the studies that are out or the practice that's going on out there and lots of the other studies in this in this field of behavior based safety so and with some additional information if you'd like more information there is a special interest group that's part of the Association for behavior analysis called the OPM network there is the Journal of organizational behavior management which any University library has lots published lots of published studies are also in the Journal of applied behavior analysis and then really kind of non behavioral journals that also publish work in this area include performance improvement quarterly Journal applied psych safety science there's Journal of safety research there are a number of them out there that are friendly toward behavioral applications like ours and publish them and have over the years there's a fantastic history of the field that goes in more in depth than I went and in fact list a bunch of the early articles and of early systematic way by Alice Dickinson and that was published in 2008 historical roots of OPM and the private sector so I'd suggest checking into these and other resources and I really appreciate you having me here and thanks a lot for listening [Applause]