Creating a “Total Safety Culture”
In a bid to continue the promotion of workplace safety culture, the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) has released a comprehensive guide on the implementation of Behavior Based Safety (BBS). This approach is often referred to as a bottom-up approach to safety, with top-down support from safety leaders. A successful Behavior Based Safety approach promotes interventions that are often people-focused the guide says and, likely will involve the incorporation of “one-to-one group observation of employees”.
According to the guide: “The initiatives have a proactive focus… encouraging individuals and their work groups to consider the potential for incident involvement, (accidents) and to assess their own behavior as safe or unsafe always, no matter what.” The guide lays out many key points for the proper utilization of a BBS program for employers which we will look at in a moment. But first, let’s take a brief look at building a safety culture and the BBS approach which could be hugely beneficial to your company.
One of the most beneficial aspects of creating a successful health and safety approach, is to create what is broadly known as a health and safety culture, or as the guide calls it a “Total Safety Culture”, a concept that is difficult to define but is surely the holy grail for all safety professionals. As with all cultural shifts it helps to have specific touchpoints to begin:
- Promote strong management commitment to behavior based safety
- Encourage respectful, trusting, open communication between management and employees regarding safety in the workplace
- Commit to improving the attitude to health and safety
- Promote increased employee engagement in safety
- Educate employees on safe and unsafe behavior
What is the BBS Approach?
As we mentioned in the opening, BBS is very much about you working closely with your employees. This can be done through group tasks or by simply monitoring staff as they work. This gives you the opportunity to set goals and offer feedback on behavior based safety. The BBS approach has a proactive focus and may include a process whereby employees are encouraged to consider the potential for incident involvement and to assess their own behavior as safe or unsafe. Your health and safety training may rely on the usual safety signs and toolbox talks which are certainly effective, but it’s what happens after the training that ensures the behavior will occur time and time again. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the points to create an appropriate BBS program.
1. Build your team for behavior based safety – To properly utilize a BBS program, you must first create a design team. The team should consist of management and front line employees and each member of the design team should be fully informed on the BBS process and hopefully want to be a part of the team. This means your team are totally responsible for design the BBS system, with all employees expected to be involved in the process.
2. Learn from past mistakes – You should use existing data from your health and safety records to create your program. This will give your team a well to draw from regarding areas that may need to be improved. Your team will also discuss each case and utilize approaches like discussing how increased situation awareness might have affected the situation. After this, you should be able to assemble the necessary safe behaviors that can build towards a safety checklist on site.
3. Critical checklist – This should be a list of safe behaviors that you have already identified in the previous action item. The guide states that your list should contain a shortlist that takes up no more than one sheet of paper. “It helps to have definitions for everything that is being measured on the back of the checklist – try not to leave anything up to subjective interpretation,” the guide says. As an employee, the best way to ensure that your checklist is usable could be to observe that employee working to discover if all categories on the list can be filled out in an observation.
4. Ensure That You Have a Measurement System – The effective observation of safe and risk behaviors during an observation is of paramount importance during your utilization of a BBS. It should be noted however that measuring is an antecedent, and you need a consequence in place to strengthen the behavior under measurement. However, when this form of measurement is used correctly, you can create an environment in which people want to be measured. Positive feedback means positive results.
5. Behavioral observations are carried out – Observations on safety behavior are carried out by workers on each other. However, the safety leader does get involved in the observation process regularly and is the key player. The safety leader provides a point of leadership for those that he/she is supervising and, as such, must be seen to “walk the talk”. They are also responsible for the design of the process, feedback to the workers and on all decisions, that arise from the process such as removal of hazards and changes to the process. Behavioral observation is the day-to-day enactment of BBS and the safety leader must own that process completely for it to succeed.
6. Feedback and Improvement Goals – Finally, and these are quite important points within the guide, the feedback on the employee should be delivered as soon as possible, and employees should be given a set of improvement goals. In terms of feedback, the guide states that you should “discuss the potential impact and listen to the observee – this formula can be used for both positive and corrective feedback.” In terms of goals, the guide states that they should be realistic and based on the current data. You should also set short goals and ensure that each employee knows what behavior or process they need to work on to reach the goal.
Is there an exact science to creating a great BBS program? Not exactly, but here at GoContractor, our goal is to keep every worker safe. Learn how to develop and implement your very own BBS program by downloading your free guide!
