Improving Your Safety
With a Behavioral Approach
(Reprinted from Hydrocarbon Processing)

The record

Terry E. McSween

Research by Du Pont and others suggest that 80 to 90 percent of today's accidents are a result of unsafe acts rather than environmental conditions. Yet very few companies achieve consistently high levels of compliance with safety procedures. New research shows the effectiveness of a behavioral approach to safety that increases compliance and greatly reduces accidents. This article presents the kind of results that you can achieve through a behavioral safety process, a summary of the key components of a behavioral safety process, and an overview of a simple process for implementing a behavioral approach within your organization's existing safety efforts.

Using the behavioral approach, a major U.S. drilling company has reduced its OSHA recordable accident rate by 48 percent and moves from the industry average to be one of the top five safety performers in the industry (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Rate of recordable injuries in a drilling company before and after supervisors
began conducting behavioral observations.

A solids-handling chemical company went from three or four OSHA recordable injuries per year to no recordable accidents over a period of more than 16 months (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Number of accidents for 16 months after employees began conducting observations.

The process that achieves these results is well-documented by experimental studies. The key components are basic:

• Regular observation of safe behavior on the job
• Feedback based on observation data
• Improvement goals
• Recognition for improvement

These element appear so simple and common sense that many people underestimate the difficulty involved in creating a behavioral safety system. These elements combine to provide a proven process for systematically managing safety on the job in a way that minimizes the risk of error due to unsafe acts, ensures a high degree of procedural compliance and maintains that level of consistency over extended periods.

The remainder of this paper will describe a step-by-step team process for implementing the key elements of a behavioral approach to safety. It will also briefly describe some of the design options for each implementation step and factors to consider in selecting from these options.

The safety process assessment

Before initiating a behavioral safety process, you first need to assess your organization's current safety efforts. This assessment has three objectives. First, it ensures that you have an accurate understanding of your organization's current efforts. Second, it enables you to develop a preliminary design for the behavioral safety process, which will be the starting point for the team process described in the next section. Third, 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.

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This article first appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing (August 1993) and is reproduced here with permission.