Behaviour Based Safety

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) is "A process that creates a safety partnership between management and employees that continually focuses people's attentions and actions on theirs, and others, daily safety behavior."

BBS in a broad term is used to describe everything from basic employee behavior audits and feedback to a comprehensive safety management system designed to change a company’s safety culture.

To achieve changes in behavior, a change in policy, procedures and/or systems most assuredly will also need some change. Our BBS program includes all the employees, from the CEO to the front line workers including hourly, salary, union employees, contractors and sub-contractors.

Our BBS approach involves:

• Solid principles about engaging, motivating, assisting, reinforcing, and sustaining safe behaviors.
• A systematic approach, examining the motivation underlying behaviours, in order to increase safe behaviour.
• An ongoing effort; not ‘once-off’ provisions, but a new way of working that the safety leader must continually promote for sustainable, positive results.
• Considerable time to achieve; however, results can be observed immediately due to the nature of measurement involved.
• Emphasis on increasing safe behaviors rather than focusing on length of time without injury. BBS programs do not depend solely on ‘lagging indicators’ (after the fact), and instead shift the focus to ‘leading indicators’