RoSPA Occupational Safety and Health at Work Congress May 2006
Our Chairman, Professor Richard Booth gave a presentation on “Getting Behavioural Safety in Perspective” at RoSPA’s Conference at the NEC on 10th May 2006.
He began with a historical note: while dramatic progress has been made in the control of risks at work, history reveals that fashionable panaceas, some of negligible utility, have bedevilled progress and continue to do so. Each ‘fashion’, as Behavioural Safety clearly is, should therefore be viewed with caution. Effective OSH management needs good systems and a positive safety culture. Without these pre-requisites it is difficult to introduce innovations, such as Behavioural Safety, successfully.
The effectiveness of Behavioural Safety programmes depends in part on the nature of the errors that the method seeks to reduce. Richard explained James Reason’s human failure model and showed how different types of errors and violations are relevant, or in some cases, not relevant to some Behavioural Safety programmes. He also explained the relationship between safety culture, safety climate and Behavioural Safety. Improvements in safety culture are usually achieved by changing attitudes - in the expectation that changing attitudes will lead to behavioural change. In contrast Behavioural Safety ‘works’ the other way round. The aim is to “force” the behaviour to the point that it becomes normalised and the desired attitude is achieved.
He drew attention to the range of Behavioural Safety methods available, including those based on observation of target behaviours, and those based on non-observational methods such as those that use risk assessment and control checklists that encourage staff to think-through tasks before embarking upon them.
Successful features* of Behavioural Safety programmes include the focus on safety-related goal attainment, changing employees’ perceptions of management, and removing barriers to working safely, improved SOPs and engineering improvements. There is substantial research evidence of success, in terms of reductions in accident rates.
However even some successful schemes may have limitations: there may be too much focus on trivial hazards; only observable hazards are covered; they may focus only on behavioural change, not on non-behavioural sources of error.
Richard concluded that Behavioural Safety is certainly not a panacea: it only ‘works’ if there are already effective safety management systems, if the safety culture is reasonably good, and if the Behavioural Safety initiative is ‘anchored’ to the health and safety system. Good schemes lead to benefits beyond the simple reduction of unsafe behaviours. But organisations who think, despite their lack of fundamentals, that Behavioural Safety will solve their problems are likely to be disappointed.
* Some of the comments are drawn from Horbury & Wright (2000)
HASTAM’s Behavioural Safety Programme, using SAM
Richard in his RoSPA talk quite properly did not compare and contrast HASTAM’s Behavioural Safety ‘SAM’ method with the schemes of our competitors.
But he now writes for our web-site as follows:
"HASTAM’s Behavioural Safety scheme “SAM” emerged well from the analysis I carried out in preparation for the talk.
Reason’s human failures embraces unintended slips and lapses, ‘rule’ and ‘knowledge’ based errors: mistaken intended actions, and routine, situational and exceptional violations.
HASTAM’s ‘SAM’ appears to be potentially very effective in reducing rule-based mistakes and situational violations, and can contribute to preventing knowledge-based mistakes. Observational Behavioural Safety may not be good at reducing slips and lapses because the formal observation periods may be too short to detect them. SAM is good at dealing with slips/lapses only if there is a robust near-miss reporting procedure. This is a good illustration of the need for a robust Safety Management system as a prerequisite for the Behavioural Safety initiative.
Observational Behavioural Safety is strong on routine violations, but if they are endemic then it raises a serious question of whether the client organisation is 'ready' for Behavioural Safety. Observational programmes are weak on situational violations (may not be observed on night shift etc) and weak or irrelevant on rule-based mistakes as they involve (in terms of operators) diagnostic skills for non-standard tasks. Knowledge-based errors should be dealt with by basic training, and observational Behavioural Safety probably makes no difference. (Competent staff are a pre-requisite of most Behavioural Safety Techniques).
In comparison with many other schemes, SAM is strong in the following areas:
- Dealing effectively with ‘non-observable’ behaviours
- Dealing effectively with non-trivial, infrequent, non-routine, and new tasks. In contrast, unobserved tasks of these types may never get on the agenda using the conventional Behavioural Safety approach.
- Making front-line staff think, not just act as automatons
- Identifying non-behavioural causal factors - eg that a SOP is deficient.
- Based as it is on a dynamic risk assessment, it should integrate well with an organisation’s statutory duties in this area.
Key to the success of SAM, is the training provided for employees, including the need to identify and report system weaknesses and inappropriate or inadequate hardware. Equally important is the training for all managers and supervisors in the theory behind behavioural safety programmes and, in particular, a method of effective interventions using the SAM cards as a mechanism. Root cause analysis is a key element in the training - it is too easy to use a Behavioural Safety Programme as a means of blaming the individual.
Perhaps SAM is not only good at providing behavioural change, but also relatively rapidly, an attitude change - there is limited evidence of this from the first pilot site, and it seems very plausible. Conventional Behavioural Safety deliverables to shop floor personnel are simply pats on the back etc - and that's not a secure basis for changing attitudes to safety. Too often, the key output from the conventional Behavioural Safety programme is direct criticism of the individual employee. Personnel using SAM hopefully, after changing their work methods and getting other changes, may see direct safety benefits, which are perceived as such. "
For more details of HASTAM’s Behavioural Safety Programme, please vist our SAM page. 
