Behavioural safety processes have now generated value and debate for thirty years, whether you love them, hate them, or have never heard of them. Multiple approaches fight for a dominant position in the market, which causes confusion, jealously guarded magical formulas, and a reinforcement of an often-risky DIY attitude.

Where does it start?

It is challenging to determine whether methods (methodology vs. home-grown) have led to subpar outcomes or, in some cases, failures.

Both equally produce significant obstacles to further endeavours.

This post will shed some light on common misconceptions and strategies based on experience working with hundreds of organisations to overcome these previously established hurdles.

By doing this, you’ll be able to make sure that your path leads to success rather than failure.

Forced Engagement or Effort

Teams made up of “voluntolds” and less-than-desirable levels of engagement and safety improvement are often the results of behavioural safety practises that force involvement.

How much passionate and eager discretionary energy, if any, do you devote each year to paying your taxes, unless you are one of the very few?

If a person is working towards an accomplishment because they must, rather than want to, expect efforts that achieve minimal expectations, rather than efforts that aim toward exceeding them.

This holds true even when companies mandate that each employee complete a particular number of observations.

A “Gotcha” Strategy

Several procedures either fail to disclose the observation or fail to get permission before monitoring customary behaviour.

These procedures operate under the mistaken belief that espionage is a more effective way to observe actual widespread practise.

“Clandestine Human intelligence” is frequently a crucial tool used by governments to fight off other governments.

It is not a tool for developing cultures where people stop thinking in terms of “Us vs. Them” and collaborate to excel in all aspects of operational performance.

Effective processes notify individuals being watched of the observation by either asking permission or, at the very least, announcing it.

The objective is to determine whether important safety measures can be taken.

If so, these safety measures show what safe looks like, and we are confident in that, then encourage the individual to keep using the specific safety measures. Find out why if they are not being taken.

Information to Punish

How are you using your data?

Employees have been disciplined because of certain procedures for actions noted during behavioural observations.

In many processes, this is a common grey area that needs careful thought.

It might be challenging to ask workers to monitor and record data on both required and optional actions on a checklist.

What should an employee do if they observe another employee breaking a safety regulation while conducting an observation, even though their responsibility for that violation remains unaffected?

Numerous efficient procedures request that staff undertake behavioural observations based on the degrees of trust inside the organisational culture, while requesting the supervisors to play a very particular specialized support role.

Improving a company’s overall BBS management becomes mandatory when you deal with a large workforce.

Behaviour-based safety checklist focuses on observing safe behaviours in the actions, approaches, and attitudes of employees.

Using this checklist during safety audits can help address unsafe behaviours and streamline the root cause discovery process with accuracy in an organisation.

These effective employee-led behavioural procedures focus on discretional behaviours, and the management systems focus on the required behaviours.

Lack of Plans of Action or Evident Success

Instead of the tool’s intended purpose of increasing safety, many processes place more emphasis on the quantity of observations.

Reality check – Behavior-Based Safety is not the panacea or magic cure that some have claimed it to be.

It is merely an additional instrument in the steadily expanding safety toolkit.

However, this technique does have a use, which is to gather information about custom and the reasons why safety procedures are either not possible or not being taken.

So, to solve these issues, the company must develop action plans that either enhance the process (if the insight isn’t in the data) or increase safety (if the implications on risks are understood).

Ineffective Efforts

Because it is necessary to perform observations, they are frequently done.

Getting observations won’t be an issue for you if people believe that the only thing that is measured or reinforced is the number of observations.

Enhancing safety will be.

Why are we just watching for the pleasure of watching if we understand that BBS’s stated purpose is to increase safety?

Why do we still make general observations about any day of the week, hour of the day, employee duration, tenure on task, trained versus untrained, icy versus humid, etc.?

Give it A THOUGHT!

Putting a Stop to UNACCEPTED Behaviour

Just the beginning is straightforward, well-intentioned, but false statements like “Accidents are caused by dangerous activities.”

Be ready; actions are not the primary contributor to mishaps or events.

A frequent saying among certain safety experts is, “What is the underlying reason for all trips, falls, and slips? Gravity!”

When one of these events occurs, incident investigations are conducted quickly to reach a conclusion that emphasises employee behaviour as the underlying cause.

This conclusion is then followed by action plans like –

• Pay attention
• Employee needs to be aware
• Employee needs to not be distracted
• Employee needs more training

However, many investigations conclude with employee behaviour since people act in certain ways for a reason.

Most people carry out their tasks as best they can since they may be motivated to do so or demotivated to avoid a particular result.

The key idea here is to look past the behaviour, train the existing staff in Behaviour-based Safety, and discover the underlying causes of the action to make lasting improvements.

If you keep your ears open, the best ideas will come to you in spades.