Reference no: EM133156745

Psychology of Behavioral Safety

Many companies have spent a lot of time and effort improving safety, usually by addressing hardware issues and installing safety management systems that include regular (e.g. monthly) line management safety audits. Over a number of years these efforts tend to produce dramatic reductions in accident rates.

Often, however, a plateau of minor accidents remains that appears to be stubbornly resistant to all efforts to remove them. Although many of these are attributed to peoples' carelessness or poor safety attitudes, most of these are triggered by deeply ingrained unsafe behaviors. Behavioral Safety addresses these by making use of proven management techniques which almost always results in a positive step change in safety performance and safety attitudes.

 Why Focus on Unsafe Behavior?

Although difficult to control, approximately 80-95 percent of all accidents are triggered by unsafe behaviors, which tend to interact with other negative features (termed Pathogens) inherent in workflow processes or present in the working environment. Often inadvertently introduced by the implementation of strategic plans, every organization has its fair share of accident causing pathogens. These pathogens lie dormant and are relatively harmless, until such time as two or more combine and are triggered by an unsafe behavior to produce an accident.

Illustrating this, is a company that installed a new production process that entailed designing and building two new mezzanine floors in an existing plant. A project team had approved plans developed by plant based engineers. Once the construction work was complete, it was found that supporting girders had been installed five foot above the second step of a staircase on both floors, thereby introducing two pathogens into the physical environment. During commissioning of the process equipment, product blockages were frequently found to occur in the related pipe work (a third pathogen) that could only be cleared by going to the top mezzanine floor where the inspection hatch was situated. Due to increased production pressures and reduced manning resulting from a downsizing exercise the blockage required the operator to isolate the equipment at a lower production floor (another pathogen), and ascend the stairs to the mezzanine floors to clear the pipe work. At this point all these pathogens combined to trigger an accident when the operator rushed up the stairs to clear the blockage. He ran into one of the low girders, gashing his head and inflicting whiplash effects on his neck while also knocking himself unconscious. This resulted in a reportable accident, lost production and associated costs, etc.

In this true example, the potential for this type of lost-time accident will always be present until such time as the pathogens are addressed. Given that it is much more difficult to address these resident pathogens, focusing attention upon the operator's unsafe behavior of running up the stairs is a much easier option as it is within the operator's control, whereas the pathogens are not. Because behavioral safety approaches identify and focus on particular sets of unsafe behaviors, people tend to be more aware of their potential to cause harm. In turn this gives people the mechanism by which they can control their own safety behavior and that of their colleagues.

A focus upon unsafe behaviors also provides a much better index of ongoing safety performance than accident rates for two reasons: First, accidents are the end result of a causal sequence that is usually triggered by an unsafe behavior; And second, unsafe behaviors can be measured in a meaningful way on a daily basis. Accident rates tend to be used as the primary outcome measure of safety performance simply because they signal that something is wrong within the company's safety management system. Because of the way they are calculated, they also provide a crude benchmark by which companies can compare the effectiveness of their safety management systems across industries. Unfortunately, this tends to result in management attention and resources being focused on safety only when accident rates rise dramatically. When the immediate problems appear to be resolved, management attention and resources are diverted to other pressing organizational issues until such time as the accident rate rises once again, and so on.

Consequently, rather than being proactive, those who focus almost exclusively on accident rates as a measure of safety performance tend to be reactive in their approach to safety. Conversely, a regular focus on actual safety behavior is proactive as it allows other safety-related issues in the accident causal chain to be identified and dealt with before an incident occurs. Because 'safety behavior' is the unit of measurement, a collaborative, problem-solving approach involving both management and employees is adopted to identify critical sets of safe and unsafe behaviors and used to develop 'Safety Behavior Inventories' (See Cooper, 1998). These inventories provide the basis for personnel to systematically monitor and observe their colleague's ongoing safety behavior, on a daily basis, in an enabling atmosphere. Based on the first few weeks' results of the peer monitoring, the workforce set their own 'safety improvement' targets. Information feedback is then provided on a weekly basis to allow the workgroups to track their progress in reaching the safety improvement targets. Companies adopting this approach are usually rewarded by fewer accidents, consistent safety management, better communications and greater involvement in team working, all of which can exert beneficial effects on production related issues and bottom line profits.

Why Do People Behave Unsafely?

People often behave unsafely because they have never been hurt before while doing their job in an unsafe way: 'I've always done the job this way' being a familiar comment. This may well be true, but the potential for an accident is never far away as illustrated by various accident triangles. Heinrich's triangle, for example, suggests that for every 330 unsafe acts, 29 will result in minor injuries and 1 in a major or lost time incident. Over an extended period of time, therefore, the lack of any injuries for those who are consistently unsafe is actually reinforcing the very behaviors that in all probability will eventually lead them to be seriously injured. The principle being illustrated here is that the consequences of behaving unsafely will nearly always determine future unsafe behavior, simply because reinforced behavior tends to be repeated.