01 December 2006
Ray Curry

Behavioural safety has been promoted in some quarters as the panacea for poor safety standards in construction and many firms have tried behavioural initiatives to improve accident rates and reduce absence, convinced that upwards of 80% of all accidents are triggered by unsafe acts.

Unfortunately, nothing is that simple. Modifying behaviour is one weapon in the safety arsenal, but it is not the answer to all safety problems, nor is it something that should be used in isolation from other programmes.

Get ready

One of the key issues is readiness. Is your organisation in a position to implement a behavioural safety programme?

Many firms who want to implement behavioural safety are not ready for the steps outlined below. They simply have too many other things to tackle to put their houses in order before they look at workforce behaviours.

---

Changing behaviour

A standard behavioural safety programme involves:

• identifying key safe and unsafe behaviours
• measuring the frequency of these behaviours
• setting improvement objectives
• giving employees feedback on the results of the measurements.

---

Programmes to promote safe behaviour are focused on frontline employees and typically they promote some form of action on their part. Workers might be encouraged to intervene directly, stopping those who are involved in unsafe acts, or to report any unsafe action they see, albeit in a "no name, no blame" environment. Unsafe acts that keep occurring can be subjected to behavioural analysis to determine the root cause of the behaviour to devise ways to eliminate them.

This model obviously depends on good communication between management and workers and between the workers themselves to ensure they understand and adopt new processes and procedures. If the organisation has not put in the groundwork to make sure communications and cooperation are routine, then the behavioural safety edifice will have no foundations.

Similarly, behavioural programmes succeed through feedback to employees, telling them what they've been observed doing, whether it was good or bad, and finding out the motivation behind unsafe actions.

Positive feedback is recognised as being much more powerful than negative criticism, but unfortunately in the UK we are not very good at patting each other on the back and telling people when they've done a good job; we are more likely to criticise or discipline, which doesn't bode well for any initiative that relies heavily on feedback to reinforce safe behaviour.

Behavioural initiatives are more likely to succeed if they concentrate initially on developing the right management behaviours. This demonstrates commitment and, if needed, drives culture change. And in construction, where observing employees may be difficult when they are scattered across remote or sprawling sites, it is sometimes easier to measure management behaviours and get some tangible gain from efforts more quickly.

Designing out risk

A sensible precursor to a thorough behavioural management programme is to pinpoint and remove whatever workers feel is the positive benefit of being unsafe. This can produce some "quick wins" in accident reduction.

Most people are fairly focused on self-preservation and few take risks on construction sites just for the hell of it. Risky behaviour usually results from people trying to save time or effort. They may take shortcuts, for example, rather than using the prescribed walkways to save time in getting from place to place on site. But if the site is designed so that the quickest route is also the safest one, the risk will be removed.

Making sure equipment is truly fit for purpose is another way to deter unsafe behaviour. People procuring hearing defenders often choose what they believe is the best equipment because it reduces noise across all frequencies. But it is usually only specific frequencies that need attenuating. Over-specified defenders result in discomfort for the users and make it difficult for them to hear anything, so they stop wearing them.

Poor work planning is often the root cause of unsafe behaviours. A maintenance team arrives at a client site, for example, only to realise, on initial inspection, that the access equipment they've brought isn't suitable. Assuming they can't borrow equipment, they're faced with the choice of going back to their depot or improvising something. That "something" is unlikely to keep them safe.

Once you have designed out the excuses for unsafe behaviour, you have a firm foundation on which to build a more widespread, traditional behavioural programme. And you will not risk putting the cart before the horse.

Ray Curry is managing consultant at health and safety consultancy Sypol.

Categories:
Construction, Training, Article, Enforcement (prosecutions), Work equipment, Training, Enforcement (prosecutions)