BSOF

Six months ago Bill and Dave's corporate managers announced a new company-wide program called Behavioral Safety and Observational Feedback (BSOF). We were bombarded with emails heralding BSOF as a method of eliminating employee injuries and accidents on the job. Yeah, right. When upper managers I've never heard of keep sending me emails telling me how "exciting" a new company program is, I pretty much write that program off as boring ass ho-hum junk that will be quickly forgotten by the majority of our workforce.

It seems any time our corporate management team hears about a hot business trend or the latest fad in manufacturing, they latch onto it like a stampede of lemmings sprinting off of a cliff. None of these people are industry leaders anymore, blazing trails for other companies' management teams to follow like Bill and Dave used to do. Instead, our top managers are content to stay complacent and simply sway whichever way the industry wind blows. They frequently foist upon us concepts and initiatives that have little if anything to do with the kind of work we do here and they expect to implement these things as one-size-fits-all solutions to our unique company problems. Rarely if ever does it work out that way. In fact most of the time management's kooky schemes end up withering on the vine soon after being launched. This results in nothing more than massive amounts of employee time being pissed away as well as large sums of cash wasted.

BSOF makes an underlying assumption that employees are idiots. According to the BSOF philosophy, employees will attempt to seriously injure, maim, or kill themselves daily unless you have BSOF in place to save them from themselves. Described as a "proactive approach to increasing safety in the workplace" BSOF is really nothing more than a campaign of spying and fear. As TC says, "It's all about finking on your coworkers."

Here's how the BSOF deal works in a nutshell. Employees pick out a fellow coworker to watch while the individual is performing a job task. While standing around staring at the person making them nervous, you have to fill out a checklist of what that employee might be doing wrong i.e. might be doing unsafely. After filling out the checklist you have to provide feedback to the person you've been quietly terrorizing. First, you set them up for the fall by complimenting he or she on what was done correctly, and how great the employee looks today. As soon as the unsuspecting coworker has been buttered up, you body slam the poor slob. You list every insignificant thing done during the job task that was dumb and may have resulted in the employee's injury or death. If he or she didn't do anything wrong during the spying session, or you just don't like the person you can use patented MSU(tm) technology to "Make Shit Up" and get them in trouble. The final step of the BSOF process is to turn the checklist in to your supervisor like the good little BSOF nazi that you are.

Since the company-wide rollout of the BSOF program months ago few if any employees have bought into the concept. It's a hard sell to make here because none of us use heavy machinery or are around dangerous equipment. It's not like we're in construction running each other over with earth scrapers every day. We sit at workbenches tinkering with standard size rackmountable electronic instruments. That's it. I suppose BSOF might be useful in some industries, but here it's just silly. The most dangerous thing we use is a soldering iron. Nobody's gonna get killed here by one of those. If one of my fellow coworkers did somehow manage to perform death by soldering iron I would assume the nitwit worked really hard at it and most likely deserved to die anyway.

Once a month supervisors beg and plead for everyone in the department to please fill out our BSOF checklists and turn them in. Nobody makes the time for this crap because we're swamped with more important things to do. Usually we wait until the last day of the month and scribble some stuff on the BSOF sheet, sign it, and hand it in. It's all faked. I suspect the real drive behind the whole project is somehow tied into the company's insurance premiums. If corporate can prove to our insurer that we've trained X amount of employees in BSOF practices that are ongoing maybe they cut us a break on the insurance cost. There has to be some weird accounting or finance angle on this because it doesn't make much sense. Anyway, we've pretty much sidestepped BSOF as of now. There's no interest or support for it. I can't wait to see what stupid idea our corporate masters grab hold of next...