By Adam Hockman
What leaders say and do impacts a company’s culture, employee well-being, and business outcomes. When leaders consistently serve the company’s vision and goals, they build trust and community among employees. That consistency can be challenged by news headlines, emerging technologies, and fluctuating company activities, all of which steal a leader’s focus. Leaders who are immersed in trends, rather than in observing employees at work and talking with them, can miss subtle cues for employee dissatisfaction and declines in productivity.
Dr. Judith Komaki, a behavioral psychologist who studies leadership behavior, found that successful leaders frequently observe their employees’ work, talk to them about it, and set goals to improve it. Conversations about work encourage leaders to enhance work conditions and provide resources that boost productivity and outcomes. It sounds simple: observe work and talk about it. Yet the tug of today’s distractions on leaders can leave employees performing their jobs without guidance or ongoing dialog about the company’s direction. Komaki and others who study leadership behavior advise two approaches for staying engaged with employees and their work: a behavioral checklist and an observation and feedback process.
Behavioral Checklist
Safety professionals are very familiar with using checklists in the workplace. In high-risk industries, managers or peers typically observe an employee’s job performance for a few minutes and mark their observations on a checklist of, for example, safe and unsafe behaviors for lifting heavy objects. The manager or observer reviews the checklist with the employee and offers feedback statements like, “Here’s what I noticed while you worked” and “This is the effect those actions will have on yourself and others.” This process is intended to support employees and encourage productive behavior, while avoiding assignment of blame for unsafe behaviors. After a feedback conversation, the observer and employee decide on the next steps—conducting more observations, providing coaching or training, altering a process, and so forth.
An observation process that includes this type of checklist is a no-brainer in industries where unsafe behavior can harm or kill a worker and others. Organizations that don’t trade in such high-stakes work can also benefit from the simplicity and power of an observational checklist.
In The New Values-Based Safety: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Your Safety Culture, Terry McSween and I discuss components of a checklist that will help create a productive, energized, and safe workplace. Each step outlined can be applied to any checklist, whether a business is in construction, tech, healthcare, or education.
Creating a Behavioral Checklist
Step 1. Determine the critical behaviors and tasks that lead to meaningful outcomes.
Consider the behaviors and tasks that contribute to a meaningful work product or goal. In safety, a checklist usually includes behaviors that help people avoid serious injuries, such as wearing insulated gloves when working with electrical wires. Human resource professionals may have checklists for hiring practices that minimize bias when reviewing a resume or portfolio, selecting a diverse group of interviewers, or drafting a standard list of interview questions focused on knowledge and skills.
Step 2. Draft a list of critical behaviors.
A checklist should help the observer assess whether certain behaviors have or have not occurred. It must be composed of observable behaviors that can be measured. Consider a teacher who works with young children. If one desirable behavior in that profession is cultivating engagement, what can an observer look for? “Keep students engaged” cannot be objectively measured, but well-specified behaviors that promote engagement can. Our checklist items might therefore read:
● Call on students randomly rather than only on those who volunteer.
● Ask students to talk with a partner before sharing an answer with the class.
● Walk around the classroom to monitor (and signal interest in) student answers.
These items enable someone to observe a class session for the presence of each critical behavior, or to count how many times each one occurs. If a teacher displays all three checklist items, they improve the likelihood of having engaged students in their class.
Step 3. Write definitions to describe the critical behaviors.
When creating a behavioral checklist, it is important to clearly define each item so that any skilled observer understands what is meant by the critical behavior. In safety, the definition of “Use fall protection” on a checklist might be “proper use of handrails, scaffolds, harnesses, and lifelines, and maintaining three points of contact at all times.” With this definition, an observer can determine whether proper fall protection is being used during the observation. This item can be applied to many other scenarios: The theater technician wears a harness while hanging lights in the auditorium. And, the technician uses the handrails when walking across the catwalk.
The definitions of critical behaviors are usually listed on the back of a paper checklist; in a digital checklist, the definitions might appear in dropdown menus or when hovering over keywords in the items.
Step 4. Format the checklist.
The checklist should include a background information section at the top: spaces for the names of observers, date, time, location, and other relevant information for the industry. Next, it should have categories of behaviors or activities, such as Body Position or Tools and Equipment. Within each category there needs to be a list of critical, observable behaviors, a space for noting whether the behavior occurred (and/or how many times), and a place for comments and concerns. Some checklists might have space for summarizing comments or tallying points across several correct behaviors or areas of concern.
Implementing a Behavioral Checklist and Observation Process
Step 5. Implement the checklist and revise it with a group of trusted employees.
No checklist is perfect or error-free from the start. It has to be piloted on a willing group of employees who understand that it is a new tool and, as such, it may have flaws. Using the checklist across multiple observers and employees performing their work will provide a sense of how clear and effective it is. When testing a new checklist, having two or three observers watch an employee work while using the checklist to score their observations is often helpful. Following the observation, the results of the checklists can be compared with respect to overlap and discrepancies, which can point to unclear or inaccurate behavioral statements or definitions. This process provides the necessary “data” for revising the checklist until it becomes a tool that leaders can use and that employees will appreciate.
Step 6. Include a debrief or feedback session after an observation.
A checklist of what needs to occur for someone to perform their work or tasks correctly is not enough to improve performance and outcomes. The observation and feedback components that stem from using the checklist are just as important. After an observation ends, the observer should have a brief conversation with the employee to discuss what they observed and offer positive and corrective feedback. The feedback conversation has three essential parts:
● Describe the behavior that was observed.
● Discuss its potential impact on the employee and their coworkers.
● Listen to what the employee has to say about their performance and the job.
The conversation might start like this: I watched you follow our general safety protocols and use your personal protective equipment. That’s great. Following the lifting procedures will keep your back healthy. (Pause.) I’m concerned that you weren’t wearing a harness. At six feet off the floor, you’re high up enough to suffer a serious incident if you fall. (Listen to the employee’s response.)
This conversation opens a channel with the employee. In this example, it could be that the employee went to the storage room to find a harness but could not find one because they were all in use. A supervisor yelled for everyone to get back to work, so the employee rushed to meet that demand and neglected their personal safety.
Honest, respectful feedback conversations help prevent employees from skirting the truth or only performing the right behaviors when an observer is nearby.
Step 7. Monitor improvements over time.
As work observations continue, look for improvements in the employee’s performance, refine the checklist, and find patterns in their performance. It might take several rounds of feedback for an employee to meet the expectations for a job task. If you look for patterns in their performance and that of other employees, you might hit on solutions that address common problems at the team level.
Employees appreciate the opportunity to watch how their performance improves over successive observations. In some work settings, managers and employees graph or monitor their performance through data visualizations. As mentioned earlier, refine the checklist and seek employee input on how to improve it and the observation and feedback process. This can and should be collaborative and positive, working toward achieving common objectives.
Step 8. Train and coach new observers.
Once a checklist is tested and refined with several employees and observers, expand the number of people who observe performance. In safety settings, some companies have moved away from asking only managers and supervisors to conduct the observations and to incorporating peer observation. Jim Spigener, Gennifer Lyon, and Terry McSween undertook a review of how behavior-based safety has changed over time. Their 2022 study found that observation and feedback processes that include a behavioral checklist can be successful if 10%–20% of employees conduct observations regularly—that is, one to two observers for every ten employees. These employees usually receive special training on observing performance, using the checklist, and delivering feedback.
Step 9. Summarize and track your observations.
Using a checklist and observing performance is a bit like taking medication: you have to take it consistently and as prescribed in order for it to work. The adage “inspect what you expect” applies to observation and feedback in that if you expect people to perform their jobs in certain ways, you must regularly verify (inspect) that they are, in fact, doing so. Once a month, gather your observers for a group debrief that includes a summary of the findings from the previous month. Use this moment to look for improvement opportunities in how the checklists and observation process are being used and whether employees are engaged and improving because of them. This allows you to roll up the results of what’s happening in the field to higher leadership. Don’t forget to celebrate successes from the previous month, such as an increased number of trained observers, improvements in team performance, and refinements to the entire system.
What’s Next?
Behavioral checklists and observation processes are simple in theory but can be challenging to carry out with consistency. They are flexible and applicable to all kinds of work tasks, even creative work that might not, at first glance, seem as discrete as the examples in this article.
Before seeking out the next big trend and adding more initiatives, leaders can examine how a checklist and observation process could help stabilize employees' work and inform the company’s strategic planning. Leaders, too, can have their own checklists and observation processes that guide them to invest in their employees and chart the way to achieve longer-term goals.
References
McSween, T. E., & Hockman, A. S. (2024). The new values-based safety: Using behavioral science to improve your safety culture. KeyPress Publishing.
Spigener, J., Lyon, G., & McSween, T. (2022). Behavior-based safety 2022: Today’s evidence. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 42(4), 336–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/01608061.2022.2048943
Adam Hockman applies behavioral and implementation science in corporate learning, occupational safety, education, healthcare, and the performing arts. He is Chief Learning Architect at ABA Technologies, Inc., where he helps clients build systems to improve employee experience, performance, and safety. He has received awards and grants for his research and dissemination efforts in behavior science. He is coauthor with Dr. Terry McSween of The New Values-Based Safety: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Your Safety Culture.
