Features Health and Safety Sawmilling
Safe returns: Nudging in sawmills

In this interview, we chat with Alexander Harald, behavioral design specialist and partner at Krukow, a behavioral design consultancy based in Denmark. 

Our focus is on how behavioral design and nudging can make sawmills safer. 

Let’s dive into the practicalities of these concepts within the sawmilling sector.

CFI: WHAT EXACTLY IS BEHAVIORAL DESIGN? 

Alexander: Behavioral design draws on principles from psychology and design thinking to understand how people make decisions. 

By looking at how our surroundings – both social and physical – affect and influence our behavior, we can find out why people behave a certain way. 

CFI: AND WHAT ABOUT NUDGING?

Nudging is about subtly guiding people’s behavior without forcing them. 

We make small changes – nudges – in the design of our surroundings. Some examples include intuitive safety signage, shadow boards, alarms, reminders and instant feedback, and rewards to make surroundings align better with human instincts. These are changes that can help make locking out, handling high risk machinery, and others, easy. 

CFI: REFLECTING ON YOUR TEAM’S TIME IN A CANADIAN SAWMILL LAST YEAR, WHAT DID YOU OBSERVE? 

During our field visit, we mapped out everyday workflows and noticed that stacker, trimmer, and sorter operators work in very high-paced and mentally demanding environments.

The machinery design and layout leaves a lot of room for improvement. It is a very high-performance environment where small human errors can cause serious injuries, set the production back and negatively influence the entire sawmill production line. 

CFI: HOW CAN WE USE NUDGING TO IMPROVE SAFETY IN SAWMILLS?

Our nudging techniques focus on setting up the physical and digital surroundings, such as signage, alarms, visual icons, and digital interfaces on machinery,  to make safe and efficient choices second nature. Make the safe choice the default option. 

A fundamental rule of thumb in behavioral design is if you want to change behavior in a certain way, make that behavior the easiest. Doing so requires a behavior-led approach, where data collection, field visits, observations and interviews creates the foundation for the development of nudges. 

CFI: CAN YOU GIVE EXAMPLES SPECIFIC TO SAWMILLS? 

Take a sawmill trimmer job where quick decisions are essential. If the surroundings don’t immediately and intuitively guide the trimmer operator to place their hands and flip the boards in the right way, the risk of injuries increases. 

We humans are biased toward simplicity and are predisposed to choose products and experiences that minimize our cognitive load, so if we must think too much to make the safe choice, we skip it, and the risk of injuries increases. 

CFI: SO, YOU’RE SAYING THAT WORKERS IN HIGH-PACED POSITIONS MUST MAKE QUICK DECISIONS AND THAT’S WHY THEY’RE GETTING HURT? 

Not necessarily, we need to discuss how the mind works regarding nudging and the fundamental ways our brains work when making decisions. 

There are two systems in our brain that determine our everyday decisions: 

The subconscious and automatic system which determines approx. 90 per cent of our decisions. This automatic part of the brain is constantly reacting to the design of our surroundings to guide everyday habits and workflow. It is used for simple, routine tasks and decisions that over time, do not require much mental effort, i.e., walking, brushing our teeth, and flipping boards. The subconscious decision process base choices on human instincts, gut feeling and immediate impressions from our surroundings – the machinery we interact with, the signage we see, the sounds we hear and how our co-workers behave. 

On the other hand, we have the conscious and analytical decision system. This system comes into play when we’re learning something new such as operating a board edger for the first time or learning a new complex lock out procedure. The analytical system allows us to be very alert and learn from new experiences. However, as the analytical system is used for more complex decision-making and is more accurate and reliable than the automatic/subconscious system, it requires more mental effort and quickly drains our mental energy. Biologically, our brain is wired to save as much energy as possible. So, we may be more reflective when using the analytical system, but it comes at a higher cost where we lose blood sugar, become tired and unfocused very quickly.

CFI: HOW CAN WE HELP WORKERS MAKE THE RIGHT DECISIONS AT THE RIGHT TIME? 

In high-pace workplaces there are various ways of using a behavior-led approach to make the right decision easy. 

However, we recommend starting by ensuring a two-step basic nudge structure:  

Developing a behavior/nudge-led framework ensuring a high level of mental energy throughout long workdays. For workers to stay safe and efficient, it’s crucial to always ensure mental surplus. In sawmills this means making sure workers get enough rest, stay hydrated, and take breaks at the right times. Fatigue sets in when workers do not have enough sleep or breaks, increasing the risk of injuries during quick decision-making scenarios. 

To always ensure a high level of mental surplus, we therefore recommend developing a behavior-led framework, outlining when and how to set up food, water and breaks during a long workday. Once the mental surplus is ensured, we recommend a basic optimization in the design of the surroundings e.g., starting with making sure workstations intuitively guide workers to place their hands correctly, the right way to stand, flip boards, use the pike pole etc. To do so, we use techniques where we – together with the sawmill – point out all the designs that are doing workers a disservice and the potential touch points where behavior change can be useful. Once we are aligned on that, we systematically start changing the colors, visual images, icons etc. in these areas – making the safe choices easy. 

CFI: WHAT CHANGES IN THE WORK ENVIRONMENT CAN NUDGE SAFE BEHAVIOR?

To nudge to safe decision-making in sawmills, we use what we call behavior change principles. These are generic behavior change principles that guide basic human instincts across work functions, age, gender etc. Principles like: 

Feedback mechanisms: using rewarding sound or images to give positive feedback or negative alarms to give negative feedback;

Reminder systems: Visual reminders like images of workers drinking water to remind workers to drink;

Visual guides: Using visual arrows, icons, light, footprints etc. to highlight certain functions or show workers where to place their hands.

Behavior change principles are generic, however, since the layout of workstations vary from each sawmill the design of the actual interventions has to be adapted to match specific job functions, work cultures etc. 

CFI: ANY SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES OF NUDGING IN SAWMILLS? 

Successful examples of nudging in sawmills can be found at Canfor’s Radium sawmill where we developed large, high contrast PPE and pedestrian maps, and signs for parking lots, mill areas and selected workstations.

These signs created a very visual and consistent way of reminding and nudging workers into making the right decisions –  such as walking in designated paths and wearing the proper PPE – throughout the workday. These nudges, amongst other initiatives, have helped greatly reduce injuries.

To sum it up, alert workers are safe workers. Making small changes in the work environment can significantly improve safety. If you want to encourage the right behavior, make it easy and remove obstacles. Improve your understanding and contribute to creating safer sawmill environments.

Patrick McDonald is a safety specialist at Canfor, with over 15 years of experience working as a safety professional in Canada. He specializes in developing safety solutions in the industrial manufacturing industry.