Behaviour-Based Safety is a process that integrates and completes the various business processes to prevent accidents at work and, unlike others (e.g. procedures, risk assessment, training, awareness campaigns, etc.), sees a strong active involvement of workers.

It is based on:

• Risky (unsafe) behaviours are in the submerged part of the accident iceberg, the largest and usually unobserved part
• If a worker has risky behaviours, these are observable and recognizable by another worker with training and practice
• The interaction between observer and observed is a strong incentive to spread the culture of safety
• Often, risky behaviour is favoured by environmental elements (cultural, organizational, technical)
• These elements can be recorded during observations and managed by interdisciplinary committees for the identification of improvement actions

BBS involves staff at all hierarchical levels involving everyone both in the observation, data collection, analysis evaluation and definition of improvement measures phases

Each manager must involve and support all employees in understanding, implementing and respecting safety processes based on behaviour and safety procedures.

Employees at all levels must recognize the need for safe and healthy behaviour and must adopt behaviours defined in a mission statement.

Each organisation can adopt the BBS model that best suits its culture and structure. A popular process model involves six sequential steps and each step should be implemented using standardised tools to ensure consistency.

• Assess the safety culture, for example through the use of questionnaires and interviews with key people representing the workforce. A report should be prepared with recommendations to establish the right conditions and changes needed for an effective BBS implementation.
• Identify critical behaviours. Site-specific behaviour should be identified and categorised to distinguish between safe and unsafe behaviour. Existing knowledge of risk assessments and accidents and near misses should be used when compiling the inventory of critical behaviours.
• Observation and feedback. The key element of BBS is for people to observe each other at work, provide real-time feedback on how safety is addressed in their actions and record safe and unsafe behaviour as factually as possible.
• Define how many active observers should be trained and set targets for the quantity and quality of observations.
• Analyse observation data. The quality and progress of the BBS process must be monitored and observation analyses must be conducted that identify barriers to safe behaviour.
• Remove obstacles (barriers) to safe behaviour. Everything that blocks the way to safe behaviour must be removed. Some barriers can be removed on the spot, while others require more time or resources to resolve. Data analysis may show that some barriers occur regularly in the same areas or during the same types of activities.
• A special team for removing barriers initiates further structural improvement actions regarding the organization, procedures and/or capabilities.
• Ensure continuous improvement. Annually, a production site must verify whether the BBS process is working effectively, efficiently and sustainably. A self-assessment questionnaire has been designed for this.

Dulioca provides specific tools to

• Identify critical behaviours
• Record observations
• Analyse observation data.
• Define improvement actions