Critical Success Factors for Behavior-based Safety

Overall, the results of this research demonstrated the effectiveness of behavior-based safety (BBS) interventions for increasing safe work behaviors and reducing injuries. Without exception, organizations participating in our research realized an improvement in their safety records after implementing a BBS process. Such success, however, was not always easily achieved. This helped identify a number of factors critical to the success of an organization's BBS efforts. The effectiveness of BBS was clearly demonstrated in Study 1 and Study 3. In Study 1, we manipulated level of employee involvement during BBS training and implementation. The strongest finding was a significant and dramatic decrease in the number of lost work days and severity of injuries after BBS training and implementation. Lost days decreased from a mean of 10.9 per month prior to the safety process to a low of 1.5 lost days per the 18 months after BBS was initiated. The results obtained from Study 3 provided additional support for the effectiveness of BBS interventions. Specifically, using both specific and global feedback to target a number of safety-related behaviors, the target organization not only increased frequencies of safe behaviors, but it also enjoyed a drop in injury rate by more than 50% over the 18-month intervention period. Acknowledging the power of BBS methods for increasing employee safety, the focus of this research was to identify factors critical to BBS success. Study 1 and Study 5 demonstrated the crucial roles of personal control, interpersonal trust, management support, and BBS training. In Study 1, safety facilitators who were involved in making implementation decisions made more interpersonal audits of hearing protection use, the target behavior they selected than did those assigned their BBS procedures. For only the empowerment or choice condition, did use of hearing protection increase significantly as a function of the observation and feedback process. Study 5 revealed that organizations opting to make their BBS process mandatory are not necessarily sacrificing employee perceptions of empowerment and personal control. In other words, an organization can build choice into the BBS process that allows employees to experience control. For example, organizations can empower employees to choose when they perform observations, how often observations are performed, and who does the observation. In fact, Study 5 revealed that employees in organization with a mandatory process reported significantly higher levels of trust in management (both abilities and intentions), trust in coworkers abilities and intentions, and satisfaction with training. Study …