The Role of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) in Preventing Injuries in the Workplace and Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

Applications of behavioral science to increase occurrences of injury-preventive behavior were introduced to industry in the early 1980s as behavior-based safety (BBS). As an evidence-based approach to improving a leading contributor to workplace injuries—employees’ behavior—BBS quickly became popular, promoted with large-scale marketing by several consulting firms. However, the BBS approach led to significant controversy. For example, union leaders criticized BBS for blaming workers for their injuries, and researchers became concerned with the inconsistent applications of behavioral-science principles.

The essential components of a BBS process include: (a) developing a checklist of the most critical safe behaviors to perform and the at-risk behaviors to avoid at a particular job site; (b) using this checklist to observe a worker’s behavior on the job and calculating a percent-safe score; (c) sharing the checklist results with the worker observed in a peer-to-peer behavioral-feedback conversation, with a focus on interpersonal problem solving and continuous improvement; (d) entering the checklist results in a database to calculate percentages of safe behavior per work team; and (e) analyzing safe and at-risk behavioral trends across work groups and/or facilities to inform the implementation of system-wide interventions for facilitating the performance of safe behavior.

In addition to decreasing the frequency of at-risk behavior, increasing occurrences of safe behavior, and preventing injuries, BBS has contributed to occupational health and safety (OHS) in other ways, including: (a) inspiring the involvement of line workers in OHS; (b) encouraging workers to submit safety-improvement suggestions; (c) promoting and supporting an interdependent companywide approach to OHS; (d) eliminating outcome-based safety incentive programs that stifle the reporting of injuries; (e) increasing the reporting and analysis of close calls and minor injuries that could have been more serious; and (f) transforming OHS from a top-down regulatory system to a bottom-up employee engagement process.

The list of BBS benefits has varied dramatically across organizations that have implemented a BBS process, with some facilities able to add to that list and others experiencing few to none of those benefits. At the same time, the implementation components of BBS have varied significantly across organizations. For example, some BBS applications: (a) eliminate or minimize the one-to-one coaching component of BBS; (b) involve managers and supervisors as the behavioral observers rather than line-level employees; (c) conduct detailed analyses of behavioral trends across departments and organizations; (d) focus entirely on the peer-to-peer coaching process; and (e) add a variety of additional components to the standard BBS process.

Given the diversity in BBS procedures and results, much could be learned from presentations of different BBS applications and outcomes. Thus, the purpose of this Special Issue "The Role of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) in Preventing Injuries in the Workplace and Beyond" is to publish case studies, commentaries, and research projects that reveal the variability in BBS applications and results, thereby enabling a determination of best BBS practices. We invite you to share your real-world experiences with BBS—successful, unsuccessful, or incomplete—that can help to determine what organizations can expect to achieve with particular applications of behavioral-science principles, as well as define barriers that organizations need to overcome in order to optimize the success of a BBS process.

Prof. Dr. E. Scott Geller
Dr. Steve Roberts
Guest Editors

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