Behavior-Based Safety: The Next Step in Injury Prevention

Historically, organizations have focused on improving safety by addressing the work environment surrounding employees. Providing hazard-free facilities and providing better tools and equipment have, understandably, worked well to improve safety. But many organizations have reached a plateau; continuing to rely solely on these approaches will produce only marginal gains. Despite having a workplace ‘designed’ to reduce hazards, incidents and injuries still occur with alarming regularity. We have come to realize (or be reminded) that 1) people are not perfect and will make mistakes despite their best intentions and working in the best of surroundings, and 2) the work culture often allows or encourages at-risk behaviors to be performed. In the last decades of the 20th century, the behavioral approach to safety performance improvement was developed to focus on reducing hazards by understanding employee behaviors in the context of their work culture.Behavior-based safety (BBS) refers to a broad category of interventions (e.g., processes, programs, strategies, tactics) in which behavioral psychology principles are applied to change specific behaviors. BBS principles have been used, often in the form of a behavioral observation and feedback process, with considerable success to reduce the occurrence of incidents and injuries, primarily by increasing the frequency of safe behaviors and decreasing the number of at-risk behaviors. The techniques used are analogous to those used in the field of