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Behavioral Safety
What is Behavioral Safety?
‘Behavioral safety’, or ‘behavior-based safety’, is the use of behavioral psychology
to promote safety at work. It has also been called ‘Organizational Safety’. Behavioral
safety involves creating a process that clearly defines a set of behaviors that within an
organization.
Goal of BS is to Reduces the risk of injury
• Identifies behavior which causes injury
• Collects data on the frequency and consistency of those behaviors
• Identifies behavior which reduces and stops injury
• Ensures feedback and reinforcement to ensure support of those positive behaviors.
The primary change is the participation of all staff. In a behavioral process, employees usually
conduct observations and provide feedback on safety practices within their work areas. These
observations provide data that is used as the basis for recognition, problem-solving, and
continuous improvement.
Employees conduct observations within their work areas and in teams that analyze
observation data and develop action plans targeting improvements in safe practices.
A Team takes responsibility for planning and implementing behavioral safety. This Team
is typically made up of a small group of empowered work place employees, with a
representative from both supervisory (management) and the department or stream
responsible for safety.
Projects in behavioral safety generally follow a step approach. Initially a safety process
assessment is performed in order to assess the organization's current safety effort. This
assessment has three objectives.
1. It ensures that you have an accurate understanding of your organization's
current efforts.
2. It enables you to develop a preliminary design for the behavioral safety
process, which will be the starting point for the team process.
3. By presenting the assessment results and preliminary design to management,
you have an opportunity to get their support for the key elements necessary
for the long-term success of your safety process.
1) The assessment report will form the document for implementation.
Recommendations in the report serve as a starting point for the Team. On studying
recommendations, the Team can decide whether to support, change, or discard them. Most
often, the Team will revise the recommendations based on their experience and knowledge of
the organization. They can then develop the additional procedural details required for
implementation. Within a shipping operation communications off the ship, the boundary of
experience and other cultural inputs may limit the effectiveness of this operation unless proper
training is given.

2] The secondly behavioral safety process is an observation procedure using a checklist

to collect data on employee compliance with safety practices. The checklist can have a variety of
formats. The goal is to develop a checklist format that is reliable and easy to use. Many
‘checklists’ in the marine realm have become ‘tick lists’. Great care should be taken to ensure that
the checklists used are effective. As a rule of thumb, questions that can be answered ‘yes’ or
‘no’ should be avoided. Ideally the observation process should not require longer than thirty
minutes completing. Some sort of conclusion must be reached, e.g. is the process safe or
unsafe? Or a score or recommendation.
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Several of the key questions the Team should consider in developing the observation
process are:
• Who will conduct the observations?
• How often will they be conducted?
• Should observers provide feedback during observations?
In developing the observation procedure, the first question to address is who will
conduct the observations. If your team has decided that observations are at least initially to be
a management responsibility, then you will need to decide which levels of management should
participate. If you have elected to go with employee observations, you will need to consider
how the employees will schedule their observations. You have at least three options:
• Rotate the responsibility among all employees
• Assign the observations to specific positions (e.g. senior operators, lead
personnel, or fire watch personnel)
• Rotate them among safety team members.
If employees are to do the observations, team members may initially conduct the
observations, then rotate other employees onto the safety team.
The frequency of observations is important. The risk associated with your business
should determine the frequency. Probably daily, weekly or monthly or for specialist operations
’when undertaken’.
It is important to consider whether observers should provide feedback to employees
they observe working safely or unsafely. If supervisors, they should generally provide corrective
feedback to employees they observe being unsafe. If employees are conducting the
observations, you might ask them to provide corrective feedback if they are comfortable doing
so. Obviously, an observer would be expected to stop any employee who is performing any
activity that places someone at risk. If your observers are to provide corrective feedback, you
should consider what the observer would say or otherwise ensure that they are trained in
providing effective feedback. The team also needs to consider whether observers should
respond with positive feedback when an employee is acting safely or when everyone in an
area is 100% safe. Again consideration needs to be given here to empowerment and
communication skills. We have all probably suffered from the ubiquitous ‘No Problem’ Problem.
As you consider implementation of the observation and feedback processes, you should
consider the existing skills and training needs of those you want to participate. For the
behavioral safety process to be successful, employees may need training in a number of areas:
• Observation skills
• Use of the checklists
• The observation procedure
• Feedback skills
• Leading meetings to review safety data
• Job-related skills identified on the safety checklist
Participants also benefit from understanding the basic theory underlying the behavioral
safety process, including the observation and feedback procedures. They will often provide
better support when they understand the reasons for the behavioral approach. In addition to
identifying the training needed to make implementation successful, your team should decide
on the most effective way to deliver training. You will want to plan a training process that
balances effectiveness with minimal cost and disruption to the workplace. The options for
training include:
• Individual coaching (tell, show, observe and provide feedback)
• Mentors
• Seminars or workshops
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• Videos or slides
You should consider individual coaching and mentors for training new observers as a
less disruptive process than providing workshops or seminars. On the other hand, providing an
understanding of the rationale for the behavioral safety process might be done most effectively
in larger groups. Often allowing employees to make videos or slides of near-miss accidents, or
past accident situations, provides and effective training tool that creates a high level of
involvement.
Teams should arrange to post data in work areas and locations where employees are
likely to see them. A good practice is to establish a bulletin board for safety in each area. You
can then readily display observation forms, safety graphs and other safety-related information.
Graphs should be simple and easy to understand. Your team should consider the value of
establishing two graphs for each area, one showing “percent safe” observation data and the
other showing the percent of observations completed each week. Each safety team should have
a separate graph for observation data from their area, meaning you may have several graphs on
the same scoreboard depending on how you have designed the observation process. For
example, you may want each shift to have a separate graph of weekly safety observations that
occurred strictly on that watch versus the other two.
Employees should establish improvement targets for their areas. These improvement
targets should be realistic based on the existing level of safety performance as indicated by the
observations. The goal is best set for a fairly short period of time so that the team can make
frequent corrections to the process and have regular opportunities to celebrate success.
To ensure that the goals get set, the team should ensure that responsibility for setting the
improvement target is clearly assigned and communicated. Generally, the person responsible
for leading the safety meetings should take responsibility for ensuring that each team sets a
safety goal. In some cases, the shore-side safety team should set the safety goal. This procedure
would be appropriate for a fleet of vessels or for a ship manager. Consideration will have to be
given to the make up of the fleet and the relative risk. Observations on a cruise ship will have
different results to those on a straight bulker for the same process.
Across industry it is accepted that employee participation is consistent with current
quality philosophy, current data does not show a significant advantage for employee
participation in goal setting versus goals assigned by management, though employees do like to
participate in setting goals. This however may not be the case in emergent manpower supply
states or in some traditionally managed companies.
Establishing this improvement goal is important for several reasons. Progress towards
an explicit goal provides a positive source of motivation and helps build pride in the area's
safety efforts. In addition, goal setting helps reduce competition by providing a non-competitive
standard of comparison. An effective goal or performance target gives the team a standard for
evaluating their performance. Members can compare their performance with their own goal
rather than where they are relative to other groups. Downplaying competition is particularly
important because different areas may have such different risks and safety requirements.
Leading a team towards a common goal is a much better team process.
Once the observation process is up and running, you will need to expand employee
involvement. If you have initially established the observation process as a management or team
responsibility, you should begin to allow employees to participate eventually. Their
participation may begin through joint observations conducted alongside supervision or as
additional or stand-in observations. Just make sure that you provide an adequate training and
orientation process for new observers.
Incentives will normally need to be set. You have several options in designing safety
incentives:
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• Create a safety award process.

• Support the safety process through the existing compensation process.
• Provide incentive compensation based on the safety process.
Traditional safety award programs often pay off people who take chances, or they may
encourage employees to not report accidents accurately. Too many people simply role the dice.
The chance on injury is usually so low that they will not get hurt, even though they take chances.
In an award program based on going a fixed time period without an accident, they will usually
get the same award as other employees that always comply with safety procedures. In addition,
if the award is significant, particularly if the award is significant to a group of employees, such
programs may discourage honest reporting of minor accidents. To avoid these shortcomings,
safety awards and incentive should be based primarily on maintaining the safety process. In
addition, small awards can be provided for maintaining a safe workplace as measured by
observation data, perhaps in combination with no lost-time accidents. The safety award process
provides a way of celebrating your successes and saying thanks to those employees who work
safely and those that make special contributions.
There are two ‘golden rules’ to incentives:
• Provide safety awards for safe behavior on the job and for behaviors related
to maintaining the safety process (observations, conducting safety meetings,
setting safety goals, etc.).
• Keep safety awards and incentives small. Your awards should be significant
enough to support compliance, but not significant enough to generate false
recording.
Regardless of the kind of award system you design, you will have to create an internal
marketing campaign to promote your safety effort with employees. You will want to consider
posters, announcements in safety meetings, articles in newsletters, and other methods of
promoting and communicating the award process.
Management need a very clearly defined role to ensure the survival of a behavioral
safety process. Managers have several key responsibilities to ensure the success of the safety
improvement effort.
• They must ensure that observations occur within required periods when
employees in their area are scheduled to be observers.
• They must conduct their own scheduled observations.
• They must participate in meetings and provide input at milestone reviews.
• They must participate in kick-off meetings when the safety team introduces
observation process to employees.
Finally, management must take actions to ensure that all observations occur on schedule. The
most important doctrine for management to understand, and a major potential problem for
traditional management style is that “Management should not respond to the observation
data.”

This observation data is a tool for employees to use in safety meetings. Too much pressure on
the observation data will bias reporting and destroy the integrity of the observation process. If
management attempts to use corrective action or to punish employees for low observation
scores, the observers will ensure that their areas look good. The observation process then
becomes a numbers game, which defeats its purpose.