Sponsor

Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)

Project Highlights

• Proactive approach to improving safety
• Utilizes three related, but distinct methods: behavior based safety (BBS), continuous improvement (CI), and safety-leadership development (SLD)
• In three demonstration pilots, CSA has helped to reduce injuries by 80%, locomotive engineer decertifications by 70%, derailments by 70%, and significantly improved labor-management relations
• Recognizes that safety-related issues are the responsibilities of both workers and managers
• CSA intends to improve organizational safety culture and decrease negative occurrences of safety through its effects on worker practices, management practices, and systemic conditions
• One of the first applications of CSA in the railroad industry

Project Point of Contact

Joyce Ranney
Project Manager
617.494.2095
joyce.ranney@dot.gov

Pilot Success

Over the past 9 years, the FRA has implemented its Clear Signal for Action (CSA) program in three multi-year demonstration pilots across three different railroad departments: the Station Services Department at Chicago Amtrak; the Transportation Department on the San Antonio Service Unit of Union Pacific Railroad (UP); and the Livonia Service Unit, also of UP. Across these three sites, CSA reduced injuries by 80%, locomotive engineer decertifications by 70%, derailments by 70%, and significantly improved labor-management relations.

The success of these demonstration pilots has led to the increased usage of CSA throughout the railroad industry, and has encouraged the development and adoption of the FRA's Railroad Safety and Risk Reduction Program in the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

Approach

Clear Signal for Action consists of three approaches, implemented to improve safety proactively:

• Behavior-Based Safety (BBS): Utilizes behavioral analysis methods to identify and address at-risk behaviors and conditions before they cause injuries. BBS uses peer-to-peer observations of and feedback about work behavior. Workers collect and analyze the data.
• Continuous Improvement (CI): CI establishes a means of analyzing data collected through the BBS process, identifying behavioral and systemic causes of observed at-risk behaviors and conditions, and then implementing corrective actions. Data gathering continues after a corrective action is deployed to allow its effectiveness to be evaluated.
• Safety-Leadership Development (SLD): SLD provides management training to promote proactive safety practices, such as BBS and CI.

To implement CSA, management creates a steering committee, consisting of several workers and sometimes one or two managers. During BBS, the Steering Committee develops a checklist of safe and at-risk work behaviors and conditions, and then trains other workers to conduct observations of their coworkers performing safe/at-risk behaviors. Following observation, these individuals provide coaching feedback to their fellow coworkers so that workers understand when and how they are performing work safely or and/or unsafely and how to improve in the future. During this phase, data are gathered indicating the reasons why individuals performed their work unsafely (as indicated by the worker). In the CI process the steering committee takes these data and uses root-cause problem solving to identify the barriers to enhancing safety. The steering committee executes corrective actions against any barriers it can remove, possibly through providing feedback to workers. For barriers requiring more formal corrective actions (e.g. protective equipment, procedural changes), management must get involved to take further action. During SLD, managers are trained to enable employees to work safely through using effective, non-disciplinary, proactive techniques. The main outcome of SLD is to show that management both endorses and supports safety initiatives.

An integrated safety program that recognizes both labor and management responsibility

In the past, the approaches of BBS, CI, and SLD have either placed the responsibility of safety on the workers, or on the managers, disregarding the fact that both workers and managers must support and participate in improving workplace safety. When both bottom-up (labor) and top-down (management) approaches for a safety program occur (through BBS, CI, and SLD), safety programs become more integrated, thus allowing for more positive impacts. These positive impacts have been observed on the demonstration pilots involved thus far.