This post is the first in a series that will discuss safety management from a psychologist’s point of view and the different philosophies that are used to develop workplace safety best practices.

The Roots of Behavioural Based Safety

Editor's note: Dr Rod Gutierrez is an employee of DuPont. DuPont is a sponsor of Sustainable Business Forum.

The dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when the number of production facilities rapidly increased, along with workplace accidents and fatalities, was the impetus for the development of safety management as a field of study and career path. Initially safety management focused on engineering – designing safer workplaces through improvements to hazardous machinery and work areas and establishing operating procedures to minimise inherent risks in production processes. Industrial leaders then turned their attention towards human behaviour and began developing processes and rules aimed at the actions of individuals and how we can help protect ourselves from hazards. Last was the development of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), which added another layer of protection to workers.

To continue making progress in safety management, leaders turned to psychology to better understand human behaviour. During this time the dominant paradigm of psychology was Behaviourism and specifically operant conditioning. Operant conditioning stipulates that learning occurs over time as a function of the positive and negative reinforcement of specific behaviours. Through operant conditioning, people make associations between a behaviour and its consequences, either positive or negative. Behavioural Based Safety (BBS), based on the principles of operant conditioning developed by prominent psychologist B.F. Skinner, emerged as these principles were applied to the workplace.

The main tenant of BBS is that reinforcement and punishment via feedback and consequences can be used to influence safety behaviour at work. According to the BBS model, behaviours that are encouraged through positive reinforcement (the application of a positive stimulus) or negative reinforcement (the removal of an aversive stimulus) are more are more likely to occur again. On the other hand, punishment (the application of an aversive stimulus) decreases the likelihood of a particular behaviour occurring again.

A combination of positive and negative reinforcement can simultaneously encourage safe behaviours and discourage unsafe behaviours in the workplace.

Is Behavioural Based Safety Enough?
While the theoretical principles underlying BBS have been proven to effectively shape employee behaviour and encourage safety in the workplace, it has also been observed that focusing solely on behaviour has limited effectiveness over the longer term and does not sustain a continued reduction in safety incidents. This is commonly known as the BBS plateau and two main limitations of BBS are often discussed as reasons for this plateau.

The first limitation of the BBS approach is our ability as humans to adjust to our environment following prolonged exposure to it. Commonly referred to as habituation, this is the tendency of living organisms to cease responding to stimuli in the environment that are repetitive and iterative. For example, habituation is the reason why people who live under a flight path are seldom troubled by aircraft noise, yet notice when this noise stops rather than when it begins. Habituation is also part of the reason that we don’t think about sensing the clothes we wear or the pressure of our shoes against our toes. The tendency to habituate to our environment, including to any applied consequences, also occurs in the workplace and over time we often stop responding to safety signs and regulations that we encounter in our workplace.

Generating behavioural change is another issue that scholars and practitioners have debated as it pertains to BBS. The theory of BBS relies on the external application and internal expectation of potential consequences as the main driving mechanism for behaviour change. Because BBS is driven by external factors – using positive and negative reinforcement and consequences to shape behaviour – it largely bypasses the complexities of personal decision making and choice selection. In many ways under a BBS approach individuals are motivated to act safely by fear of repercussions and consequences, delivered by their supervisors or safety officers, rather than by a true commitment to safety as an internal value.

Applying a purely behaviour-based safety approach can help organizations increase safety awareness and reduce safety incidents in their workplaces. However, for longer term success in workplace safety, organizations should look to integrating the tenants of BBS with other strategies to develop and implement a robust safety management program.