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)