Behavior-based safety is a process that reveals to management the overall safety of a workplace. Established to increase control and manageability in industrial settings, BBS strives to focus on workers’ attention on their own and their peers’ daily safety behavior. BBS mandates that management and employees alike consistently focus attention and action on their own daily behavior to keep facilities safe.
When BBS goes as planned, employees are more engaged in their safety and more willing to take responsibility for their safety-related behavior. They’re also able to hold their peers accountable when unsafe practices occur. The result is a workforce that is acutely aware of safety protocols and is actively working to stay safe.
Behavior-Based Safety Beginnings
BBS owes its beginning to Jim Spigener, who at the time of BBS’s conception was vice president of BST, INC. Dissatisfied with the lack of progress and ingenuity in industrial safety concepts, Spigener’s intention was for BBS to become another component in his organization’s safety program.
Spigner wanted to increase the effectiveness of safety programs. Since most safety concepts and strategies focus on engineering and administrative controls, Spigner thought these controls were forgetting a crucial factor in workplace accidents: people. Sure, machines can shut themselves down when a sensor goes off, but no machine can monitor the reckless habits of workers. Administrative controls like signs, floor markings, and labels only work when teams are being mindful of rules. Without people being accountable for safety, safety problems would always plague the workplace. This was the way BBS approached the problem of safety.
With the help of the science of behavioral change, Spigner created system-focused BBS, which seeks to find, then reduce or eliminate exposures that lead to accidents and injury by improving the systems that make up a facility’s operations. The surface causes of these incidents are usually obvious, but knowing the surface cause will not typically stop the incident from happening again. The best way to prevent an incident from repeating itself is to utilize behavior-based safety(BBS), which examines the overall safety of your workplace.
Every safety leader can agree that the #1 priority of any EHS program is to reduce workplace risk. Yet, one thing that continues to keep the community divided is the effectiveness of behavior-based safety programs.
Even though behavior-based safety has a bad rap in some safety circles, when it’s done well, the results are undeniable. BBS can significantly lower risk and help eliminate workplace incidents. But, like with any other HSE program, unlocking the full benefits depends upon a successful implementation. In this post, we’re going to walk through eight simple steps you can take to build a behavior-based safety program that sticks.
Step 1: Secure support and Pick Your Behavior-Based Safety Team
To ensure the success of any new safety program or process, securing management commitment and buy-in at the front-line worker level is critical. Without everyone on the same page and aligned on program goals, your BBS initiative is likely to fail. During the program planning stage, assemble a team of A-players that are already familiar with behavior-based safety to assist you with program design and determining measures of success.
Step 2: Collect and Review EHS Data
Safety departments capture so much critical data and yet far too much of it goes underutilized. Be sure to review and analyze all data collected during safety audits and inspections to help determine which tasks and jobs pose the greatest risks. Data analysis will help reveal areas for improvement as well as help uncover new trends to investigate further.
Step 3: Create a Critical Behavior Checklist
After a complete data review, you should be able to clearly identify risky behaviors that have contributed to past incidents, and those that have the potential to cause future harm. Next, create a checklist that details all required behaviors to complete specific jobs. Your checklist will then be used by supervisors during observations to log safe and unsafe behaviors.
Step 4: Track and Measure Behavior
Implement a simple measurement system to effectively track and calculate the frequency of both safe and risky actions employees take during behavior observations.
Step 5: Conduct Behavioral Observations
Decide which members of your behavior-based safety team will be conducting the observations and decide how often they are to be completed. Depending on your organization’s environment and the risk severity of the job, observations should be conducted on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. During a behavioral observation, the observer will record positive behaviors, risky behaviors and make note of areas for improvement.
Step 6: Give Feedback
After a completed observation, the supervisor should immediately give feedback to employees and review their behavior in detail. Feedback should cover positive and at-risk behaviors, as well as discuss the potential impact of risky behavior.
Step 7: Leverage Your Data
Use your findings to your advantage to create a data-driven safety strategy to mitigate future risk. This should include addressing and eliminating at-risk behaviors by promoting new, safe behaviors. Your data should also help inform your program’s continuous improvement goals.
Step 8: Measure Success and Continuously Improve
Working towards continuous improvement means regularly testing and reflecting on the effectiveness of your behavior-based safety program to keep making positive progress. After reviewing results on a monthly basis, consider making program tweaks and process adjustments as needed.
Prepared By M.Ajmal Khan.
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