Behavioral safety is a method used for changing safety behavior to help reduce injury and incident rates and save money in the long run. On average, it is stated that one year after implementing BBS, the average recorded injury rate at such sites decreases by 29%. After five years, the reduction rate averages at 72 percent and after seven or more years, the average recorded injury rate has dropped by 79%.
The amount of unsafe practices resulting from unsafe behavior today is significant. Applying useful BBS applications to organizations allows companies to focus on:
- Behavior
- Alerting necessary employees of trainings
- Data to improve direct behavior and processes
- Decreased and monitored risk controls
- Increased savings and safety provisions
EHS and Sustainability Performance Management
Environmental, Health, Safety & Sustainability software helps organizations reduce risk, ensure compliance and improve business performance. When engaging in daily activities in the workforce it is crucial to follow best practice capabilities to manage corporate and operational level programs.
Corporate EHS and Sustainability is responsible for managing the governance, risk and compliance of operating companies and assets. At the heart of these programs, are the tools to monitor and evaluate performance, operational risk and key performance metrics. Such performance management is in high demand by corporate EHS and Sustainability practitioners.
Robust Behavior Safety
One of the practicalities of leading EHS programs is a robust Behavior Safety (BBS) program. BBS is gaining more interest across industry sectors globally and has the distinct advantage of needing the involvement of both employees and the employer.
More about BBS
BBS fosters a healthy safety culture by ensuring users focus on the process rather than the outcome. BBS adopted within EHS Management software allows users to consider already built data and then make changes. The employee perspective is key, but BBS should be a safety partnership between management, allowing for an environment of trust, and employees with taking ownership of their own safety.
According to Quality Safety Edge, “Companies can do two things to help pave the way for a behavior-based safety process. First, ensure that managers and supervisors are providing effective leadership by developing working relationships with employees that foster open dialogue and communication. The result is a managerial environment of trust that will help maximize the acceptance of behavior-based safety. Second, executive management needs to ensure that the organization aggressively addresses physical hazards and unsafe working conditions.”
When looking to make changes within EHS performance it is important to take notice of product behavior. BBS is a great method because it allows for fluent modification. Teaching users to make small and lasting changes first is always the most efficient approach to create lasting efforts within workplace safety. EHS Management software along with BBS, allows for a fully customizable solution to observe and keep behaviors and capabilities in sight to better reach the top goal of improving safety performance and culture in the workplace.
What Companies are Doing Today
To reduce incidents and create a culture of safety in the workplace, many leading companies have adopted BBS programs that encourage personal responsibility for safety.
BBS is a scientific approach to raising awareness in the workforce by using observation and feedback to identify unsafe as well as safe conditions in the workplace with an employee-driven process. It is important within any business, to focus on the good as well as the bad. When employees are given positive feedback, it reinforces good behaviors and allows them to feel appreciated thus wanting to do better. Rewarding employees with social recognition, group rewards and regular evaluations is a trusted method that also improves safety.
Create a Proactive Approach to Identifying and Eliminating Hazards
Reaching safety goals, in most cases, is a process. However, workplace safety is important and if proper tools are set in place with EHS Management software, users can achieve faster gains with fewer incidents.
A standardized method for effecting behavioral changes for employees allows companies to save money in the long term by spending money in the short term. It paves the road for employees to ensure safety in their practice and reduces injuries and fatality cases.
With heavy demands in the workplace, it’s understandable that every necessary detail does not get the attention it needs. Is it acceptable? That’s a different story. But, supervisors are busy and new employees are most often needed immediately on the floor. These two reasons alone are part of why it can take months before employees actually catch up on responsibilities. An EHS Management system paves the way for employees by closing training gaps with trusted modules. The goal is to get processes moving quicker and avoid incidents that could have been avoided.
How Employee Training Helps
Standardizing employee training is the best way to ensure employees are performing their jobs safely. EHS Management software makes it easy to do this by streamlining processes and effectively assigning users their specific role’s training. Employee Training also benefits facilities by providing automatic notifications for scheduled and overdue trainings, so that nothing pressing goes unnoticed.
Risk Management Helps Save Indirectly and Directly
If companies prepare for risk before it happens, it can benefit them in the long run. Businesses that can successfully combat current and emerging risks have a significant advantage over those who don’t. Applying risk management tools to EHS organizations helps reduce job-related incidents, increase the level of workplace safety and compliance while providing a systematic method for handling such events with ease. Applying risk controls to organizations benefits direct and indirect costs as well as productivity.
How Risk Management Helps
Standardization of a system increases reliability. Risk Management tools offer a closed-loop process that enables continuous improvement and proactive management that provides users with a solution to nuances before they become a problem. Risk Management allows employees to go beyond compliance.
Then there’s always Incident Management
Incident Management is a tool that centralizes tracking of both quality and safety events to better identify and eliminate systemic risk. Things like safety incidents, customer complaints and quality issues are document gaps that warrant deeper analysis. HSEQ (Health Safety Environmental & Quality) integration streamlines processes by adding incident filtering to show risk by level that way users can see where to focus efforts. HSEQ automates corrective action routing so problems don’t go by the wayside and risk-based verification ensures corrective action sufficiently reduces risk.
How Does This Benefit You?
Collaborative tools create a culture of safety. They improve the process of keeping individuals safe by adding and fostering controls. An important thing to remember is that proper technology allows every incident or safety lesson learned to be recorded within documents. This creates leverage to be used later, if needed. With corrective and preventive actions, every hazard and incident can be followed up with.
How Corrective Action Helps
Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA) are a central element of any BBS approach. CAPAs allow users to correct problems and ensure that corrections are applied to other related features. EHS Management software helps automate the process and provides an efficient strategy for routing any CAPA through necessary stages. Necessary CAPAs go through the review, root cause analysis, corrective action and verification stages. This ensures that employees are especially kept safe by not only correcting problems, but by sharing the feedback within the entire organization, regardless of location.
Usability has a big impact on implementation success as it allows employees to log into the system and do things like: record incidents, log observations and track assigned corrective actions from any location. Keeping the changes company-wide allows others to learn from mishaps and incidents too, which is better in the long run.
Common EHS Gaps that Can Benefit from BBS and EHS Management Software
Near-miss tracking: Mandatory reporting of near-misses expands datasets so that users can better predict where future incidents may occur
Regulatory compliance: Integrated EHS Software makes it easy to identify regulatory requirements that aren’t addressed by existing controls
Visibility: Only about half of companies have integrated EHS data with automated business systems, or plan to. This lack of integration keeps related data in separate silos, blocking visibility.
Important to Remember
Leveraging technology for better performance with well-developed programs minimizes injuries, safety risks and environmental impacts. Automated software and BBS allows management help to cut primary containment incidents in half, also reducing emergency work by up to 90 percent.
Enterprise Reporting gives users the visibility to see the results of your safety campaigns. It helps to quickly track progress and identify other trends that need attention.
BBS within EHS Management Software
By automating EHS Management software, EHS companies get increased benefits such as increased profits from eliminating manual processes, which can add up to millions over the lifetime of a system, reduced waste by increasing control over the production process and helping users track resource use. Automated software enhances productivity from reduced administrative burden and streamlines workflows.
Encouraging employees to participate in safety protocols helps ensure the overall safety of the employee, customer, environment and organization. It pays to include Behavior Based Safety into already build safety precautions because it is easy to adopt small changes that turn into bigger changes overtime. Automated software fosters these changes with set modules to simplify productivity and increase overall efficiency.
