Lots of companies think they’re engaging in behavioral safety because they have implemented initiatives to try and reduce accidents. The truth is that safety needs to be embedded into how a company eats, sleeps and breathes. Management need to drive it, employees need to be proud of it and contractors need to define you by it. Behavior Based Safety is just one weapon in your armory to achieve this.
What’s it all about?
Behavioral Based Safety involves a systematic and continuous strategy whereby employees volunteer to observe their peers’ work activities and identify unsafe behaviors so that improvements can be discussed, implemented and once again observed. Workers on the front line are the most likely to have an accident, and have traditionally been un-involved in safety management whereas behavioral safety brings them right into the thick of it.
The behaviors to be observed are identified by analyzing historical accident reports which are likely to show that a small number of risky behaviors cause the greatest number of accidents. Workplace factors which may trigger such risky behavior such as rewards and punishments are identified (e.g. it’s uncomfortable to wear eye protection). It’s important to get to the bottom of ‘why’ employees may be behaving unsafely, and much of that is embedded in the culture of the company, re-emphasizing the need for a holistic approach which includes both management and employees.
Metrics are used to clearly show improvements in behavior or to encourage safer behavior and positively re-enforce the strategy. Three forms of feedback are used to overcome apathy and encourage continuous improvement:
- Verbal feedback at the time of observation
- Graphical feedback throughout the workplace
- Tabulated feedback for weekly discussion
Does it work?
While Behavior Based Safety offers benefits such as discouraging unsafe and encouraging safe behaviors and involving employees in the process, when implemented incorrectly, it can cause major issues. These include pointing the finger at the behavior of the employee while an improvement in the workplace environment, the process, the tools, the materials or in many cases better training could in fact be the root cause of the issue. The continuous pressure exuded on employees to ‘behave safely’ can also have the opposite effect as the employee may see no value in the safe behavior. If there was no accident when they behaved like this many times before, why will there be one now?
All in all, ‘fixing’ employees’ behavior within a broken culture is never going to work. According to Ron Bowles, director of operations for Portland, Ore.-based Strategic Safety Associates the key to true, positive behavior change “is to create an environment where, rather than have safety as something that is being done to me or for me, it’s something that’s being done with me or by me. Once I begin to own it, I can have incredible success.”
The challenge of safety professionals is to find a way to make employees self-accountable for their own and their colleague’s safety. Forcing behaviors takes that power to change right out of their hands.
So what’s the conclusion on BBS?
Behavior Based Safety can in fact be a success, but management must first tick a few boxes. Safety performance needs to be planted in the heads of every worker, contractor and manager as a core value of the company. It needs to be built into systems, machinery, processes, investments, communications and the core architecture of the company. Employees should be shocked if a colleague is cynical or disengaged. A behavior based approach to safety has the potential to be a success so long as management, employees and contractors trust and have confidence in one-another to whole-heatedly embrace it as an attitude rather than a discipline.
How can GoContractor help?
GoContractor is just one tool in helping companies achieve great safety cultures. Our online on-boarding platform allows you prepare employees and contractors in advance of arrival on site. This means that they are pre-qualified and take their safety orientation online. When they arrive one day one, they already have a good knowledge of the company safety culture, policies and procedures so that management can spend their introductory hour re-enforcing and reminding. Workers feed back that they feel “more confident about what to expect on their first day”, and safety managers have a clear and transparent view of the flow of workers and their safety training. This system is perfectly suited to companies with high turnover of staff or who use a lot of subcontractors. Contact us if you’d like to learn more.
