BBS has become an entrenched part of the EHS landscape since it first emerged in the 1980s. Still, many safety professionals rightly point out that what many people think of as behavior-based safety doesn’t work.

These are the processes that are isolated from other safety systems, done under duress, exclude key players like managers or supervisors, or are used simply to dump responsibility for safety onto employees. So why does BBS remain so popular? And what do successful BBS users know that others don’t?

Four reasons  you should know to make your BBS implementation a successful exercise for your organizaton.

BBS first came into vogue in the late 1980s just as the idea of a zero injury organization was beginning to emerge. At a time when some number of accidents was “just expected,” the idea of significantly reducing — and even eliminating — workplace injuries was revolutionary. The problem was that there were several things in the way:

Behavior-based safety offered a way to address these issues by introducing a new and more precise way of measuring safety: anonymously documenting the exposures that existed in the day-to-day configuration of people, process and equipment.

This in turn opened doors to upstream interventions. It also offered front-line employees a significant voice in defining safety on their own terms.

Why this matters: An organization as a whole lives and dies on the behavior of its people. BBS offers a unique starting point for collaboration among various levels and functions. A focus on safety makes that collaboration immediately personal and dependent on discussing values — real values, not lunchroom posters.

Why this matters:  It’s a common misconception that when you’re measuring injuries that you’re also measuring exposures.

This idea comes from a literal translation of the accident iceberg, which posits a predictive relationship between injury and severity. Recent research shows that while the model is accurate descriptively (less serious injuries do happen more often than more severe injuries), it is not accurate predictively (there is not a constant ratio between injury types as some people assert). In the same way, other assumptions about accident causation (that it’s either “technical failure” or “human error”) or metrics (e.g. that low injury rates indicate that safety generally is well-managed) are proving to be over-simplified, inaccurate and often downright harmful.

Why this matters: Training is important, but it is a poor change tool. Despite our best intentions, we tend to learn new behaviors by experiencing the results that come from performing those behaviors ourselves. If no negative consequences occur, the behavior is reinforced and usually repeated until it becomes habitual.

For example, even though we’re told that speeding can lead to an accident, most of us have experienced no negative consequences from speeding. Even the occasional speeding ticket does not change the belief developed from our experience: that speeding is not inherently dangerous. Our experience gives us false feedback.

Why this matters: Safety performance has always been subject to “constrains” thinking — people looking for the one all-inclusive method that will fix everything. But no single approach can correct for a dysfunctional team culture, absentee management or production-at-all-costs business systems. A well-balanced portfolio of tools includes (but doesn’t exclusively rely on) BBS and the insights it offers.