Behavioral-based safety: wanted dead or alive?
Love it or hate it, Behavioral-Based Safety (BBS) has a great reputation as a proven scientific process that improves occupational/industrial safety performance and reduces workplace injuries. Conversely, many consultants and practitioners say BBS is dead and has outlived its usefulness, as they promote similar, but subtly different, approaches that lack evidence they improve safety or reduce injuries & fatalities.
BBS is a generic term that broadly speaks to an observation and conversation process; like automobiles, BBS processes come in many guises containing many features. These include, for example, safety leadership and involvement, employee engagement & participation, observation focus, observation contact rates, types of feedback used, participative, assigned or implicit goals, managerial commitment to the process, the corrective and preventive action processes, and the way the process is maintained daily. How these features are configured and executed is largely determined by how the process suits the prevailing business culture and is known to impact results.
The value of BBS to businesses is substantiated by evidence showing [1] increased managerial and employee engagement in, and ownership of, safety, [2] reductions in hazards and injuries, [3] reduced operating costs, [4] reduced insurance premiums, and [5] return on investment.
An award-winning author, with past professorships in both Safety, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Dom Cooper PhD, helped pioneer Behavioural-Safety in the UK, has helped reduce injuries in many industries around the globe, and has published books, scientific manuscripts, and numerous practitioner articles over the past 30 years or so on safety culture, safety leadership and a host of other safety-related topics.
Previously acknowledged as a global-expert on behavioural safety, he has been named as one of most important EHS Influencer’s alongside James Reason, Erik Hollnagel, Jorma Saari and others.
I will try to arrange a time with Scott tomorrow for the short video