Behavioural Safety

Traditionally, safety focuses on PPE, hardware, equipment, housekeeping, tools, machinery guarding and the like. This is critical of course and helps us achieve Safe Conditions, Safe Acts and a Safe Place of Work.

The natural progression from this is to work on Safe Systems of Work; procedures, instructions, safe methods of working, Permits to Work and so on.

However, even with these systems and procedures in place, we were still finding that accidents and injuries were occurring in the workplace. We quickly realised that safety performance stopped improving and started to level out, and that we could not achieve zero injuries without tackling behaviour in the workplace as well.

Therefore, we introduced a Behavioural Safety Training Programme called “Supporting Behavioural Change”, and this tackles the following key areas to enable individuals and teams to work safely at all times:

• Empowering individuals to act safely and recognise unsafe situations.
• Discussions on accident free workplaces – do they exist?
• Common excuses for accidents.
• The accident journey – culture, leadership, behaviour, etc.
• What is behaviour?
• Consequences of our behaviour – Positive, Immediate, Certain.
• Positive reinforcement – supporting each other.
• Taking responsibility – for our own safety and the safety of others.
• Communication – sharing best practice and guidance.
• Motivation – why behavioural safety is important.
• Leadership – we all have a role to play.