The Role of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) in Preventing Injuries in the Workplace and Beyond
A special issue of Safety (ISSN 2313-576X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 March 2021) | Viewed by 2840
Special Issue Editors
Interests: development and evaluation of behavior change strategies to improve quality of life; behavioral community interventions for litter control, resource recovery, energy conservation, crime prevention, transportation management, safety belt promotion, the reduction of alcohol-impaired driving, injury control, and child survival in underdeveloped countries; industrial performance science for occupational health and safety
Brief Bio: E. Scott Geller, Ph.D., Alumni Distinguished Professor, is completing his 50th year as a teacher and researcher in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech, and Director of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems. Dr. Geller is also a co-founder and Senior Partner of Safety Performance Solutions, Inc. He has authored, coauthored, or edited 51 books, 88 book chapters, 39 training manuals, 272 magazine articles, and over 300 research articles addressing the development and evaluation of behavior-focused interventions to improve human welfare and life satisfaction. Dr. Geller has received lifetime achievement awards from the International Organizational Behavior Management Network and the American Psychological Foundation. In 2011, The College of Wooster awarded Professor Geller the Honorary Degree: Doctor of Humane Letters. He and his daughter, Krista S. Geller, Ph.D. have recently co-founded the teaching and consulting firm—GellerAC4P, Inc.—to spread actively caring for people (AC4P) principles and applications worldwide, see www.gellerac4p.org and www.ac4p.org.
Interests: the design, implementation, and evaluation of behavior and people-based safety processes; the assessment of organizational culture to guide safety interventions; increasing employee involvement in safety activities; organizational management systems design; organizational leadership development; understanding and reducing human error in the workplace
Brief Bio: Steve is co-founder and senior partner at Safety Performance Solutions. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Virginia Tech with a focus in Organizational Behavior Management. For the past 30 years, his areas of expertise include the implementation and evaluation of behavior and people-based safety processes, the assessment of organizational culture, management systems design, organizational leadership development, and reducing human error in the workplace. Steve taught the ASSE Seminarfest course People-Based Safety each year from 2005 to 2018. Steve is also lead author for the book chapter Principles of Behavior-Based Safety in the Handbook of Safety Principles, published in 2018 by John Wiley & Sons.
Special Issue Information
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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Keywords
- occupational safety
- applied behavioral science
- injury prevention
- the psychology of safety
- occupational health and safety (OHS)
- safety culture
- behavior-based observation and feedback
- behavior-based coaching
- safety incentives
- employee engagement for safety
- leading indicators
- behavioral safety
- behavior-based incentives
- behavioral checklists
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