Behavioural Safety – Shaping Sustainable Accident Free environments

Behaviour-based safety is about identifying management policies and practices that influence  workforce behaviour. Recognising perceptions and attitudes that influence behaviour provides an  opportunity to reduce at-risk behaviours by challenging the unsafe attitudes that underpin them. 

Our program helps organisations to understand behaviour-based safety, it introduces and embeds techniques that can be deployed when carrying out day-to-day duties and responsibilities. We promote and deliver safety management systems that drive and sustain a cultural shift towards  safety becoming ‘the way we do things around here.’ 

Behaviour-based Safety Program 

A targeted behaviour-based safety program will: 

• Drive a Safety first culture 

• Reduce accidents, near misses, property and equipment damage. 

• Improve quality. 

• Reduce absenteeism. 

• Maintain a healthier workforce. 

• Decrease injury and illness rates. 

• Improve workers' feelings about their work. 

• Reduce workers' compensations costs. 

• Elevate safety to a higher level of awareness. 

A typical behaviour-based safety workshop will cover the following: 

• Define behaviour and identify the scope and purpose of a behaviour-based safety program

• Distinguish between the roles and responsibilities of the supervisor and the employee

• Identify factors that cause incidents (environmental, organisational and personal factors)

• Identify the influences of behaviour 

• Determine how to effectively observe behaviour 

• Identify behaviour reinforcement concepts 

• Specify ways to motivate employees and address the human factor 

• Identify the importance of attitude and how it affects safety on the job • Describe transactional analysis

We would commence engagement by running a Safety attitude survey across the whole workforce  to give us a benchmark against which we can measure the impact of our intervention and  sustainability of the changes in behaviour we drive.  

We would review the management structure, organisation of workstreams to develop our understanding of the business. 

Following this we will present findings to the Senior Management team before embarking on a series  of one to one confidential interviews with staff representing every workstream at every level of the  organisation. This information will inform and help formulate our hypothesis on where the  organisation is at and what needs to be done, where and how. 

At this stage we would feedback to the senior management team confirming the prevalent  behavioural Safety culture of the organisation and the plan to address areas of concern and  influence. 

This process will ‘shine a light’ on natural champions of behavioural safety who become the  backbone of our team to drive change and influence behaviours and ultimately lead as we step away 

We would advocate rerunning the Safety Attitude Survey, every 2 years thereafter to monitor the  effect of ongoing interventions and sustainability of the changes they drive. 

Finally, it would be an option to consider working towards ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety  Management System ISO 45001 which is an international standard that specifies requirements for  an occupational health and safety (OH&S) management system. It provides a framework for  organizations to manage risks and improve OH&S performance and works best as part of a wider  safety management strategy as opposed to a stand-alone initiative.

How to take this forward 

1. Presentation on Teams – open discussion to understand, challenge and customise a  proposal 

2. BCCSL – Table proposal and quote to deliver within one week of the presentation