Behavior-based safety (BBS) programs are a process in which management and employees work together to continually focus people's attentions and actions on theirs, and others, daily safety behavior. By focusing greater attention on how employees work and devising safe alternatives to high-risk actions, BBS programs protect people, productivity, and profitability.
Check out our blog post on the basics of behavior based safety for more information. Or download a free behavior based safety checklist to get a feel of how BBS programs work.
However, even a comprehensive safety program aimed at managing unsafe behavior is not without its critics. Let's look at both sides of BBS programs so interested parties know what to expect when they bring similar initiatives to their facilities.
Safety directly impacts workers. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. businesses reported 2.9 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses and 4,836 fatal injuries in 2015. With small changes to procedures, perhaps many of these injuries could have been avoided.
BBS programs act as common ground between upper management and rank-and-file equipment operators or line workers. Both are looking for simple methods of production that decrease risk.
The safety observations conducted by employees on each other ensure everyone is involved in safety. When workers are included in how companies develop safety measures and why, changes feel less like an order from higher-ups and more like a cooperative effort.
Critics of BBS programs say they unfairly target workers, a claim that has merit in certain instances. A BBS program that starts and ends with a list of actions employees are required to carry out under penalty of reprimand or termination has missed the point of BBS entirely. In such a case, implementers need to search for ways to improve their behavior based safety program.
Unsafe activity at the worksite does not happen in a vacuum. Employees who put themselves at risk do not normally do so without cause. Perhaps they lack training or clear information regarding how exactly their methods put them in jeopardy. Maybe managers haven't made crucial resources available to them. Whatever the case may be, the objective of BBS programs is and should always be a search for the root cause of dangerous actions, not a blame game.
BBS programs encourage efficient recordkeeping practices across key safety metrics, the information from which is then fed into continuous improvement and organizational change models. Organizations keep track of key BBS metrics such as percent safe (the number of safe observations / the number of observations) to track their safety progress over time and can hone in on behaviors that have a higher percentage of unsafe behaviors (the number of unsafe observations / the number of observations).
Organizations can then implement programs, procedures, or hazard controls to improve unsafe behaviors and put the BBS data to real-world use in protecting their workers. IndustrySafe safety software can help your organization analyze its behavior based safety data and glean intelligent insights that will improve how your company operates. Sign up for our free demo below.
BBS programs require organizations to manage significant amounts of data to allow for analyzing safe and unsafe behaviors. If an organization with 200 employees implements a behavior based safety program that requires each employee to conduct an observation once a week and at each observation an employee reviews five behaviors; this behavior based program quickly adds up to 1,000 data points a week, or 52,000 behavior based safety observation data points in a year. Large complex organizations may have many more BBS data points to analyze.
Organizations without simple and easy-to-use tools for collecting and analyzing their observational safety data often fall behind on collecting and analyzing their data. Employees conducting observations may also face fatigue in conducting observations or in entering their results without easy-to-use data entry tools. Without a continuous stream of high-quality data, a key part of the observation feedback loop is missing and a company's BBS program may lose steam and effectiveness. Or to quote a common data system phrase - "Garbage in / Garbage Out".
Vector EHS Management provides multiple ways to solve this problem of collecting and analyzing large amounts of BBS data with the Vector EHS Behavior Based Safety Software. Check out this information about this module and/or sign up for a demo today.
