Don’t Measure Accidents Measure Behaviors

We may be getting tired of hearing about the positives and negatives surrounding behavior based safety programs, but whether we like it or not, safety is and has always been a behavioral issue.  Even after companies spend a tremendous amount of time and money improving safety through other means, there always seems to remain those minor (sometimes major) accidents that persist, many of which are triggered by unsafe behaviors. 

Simply put, Behavior Based Safety seeks to increase the number of safe behaviors of all employees which will build safe habits. The combination of all the new safety habits will reduce incidents.

Focusing on unsafe behaviors provides a much better index of ongoing safety performance than accident rates for two reasons.

1.     Accidents are the end result of a causal sequence that is usually triggered by an unsafe behavior.

2.     Unsafe behaviors can be measured in a meaningful way on daily basis.

From the standpoint of using measurements to implement an award system to improve safe behaviors, using the accident rate tends to be reactive while using the unsafe behaviors will always be proactive.

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