Behavior-Based Safety & Human Factors - There is Synergy
Authors: Spigener Jim 
Published: October 2008

This paper presents the overlap and interaction between Human Factors Engineering and Behavior-Based Safety in managing workgroups safety performance. After introducing three categories of critical safety-related behaviors: enabled, difficult, and non-enabled, the paper discusses the primary concepts of the behavior-based approach to accident prevention. It then sketches six current myths about behaviorbased safety, and addresses them through a detailed presentation of the four key activities of Behavior-Based Safety at the level of the workgroup.

Introduction

Over the past few years the emphasis on safety has grown to the point that many companies espouse the value that safety is the most important thing to be considered in the organizations operation. This started primarily in the heavily regulated industries such as Chemicals and the Nuclear power industry. This regulatory and litigious environment meant to most that"safe operation" was not optional. Over the years the focus on safe operations became a norm for those businesses.

The oil industry and specifically offshore industries came aboard with this thinking in the more recent past. This need to improve safety has been reinforced by the losses that have occurred in this industry and the realization that they had to fiid more economical means to operate given the pressure on profits from the global competition. Safety in short became a two edged sword for the offshore industry. First, it was good business not to be incurring the financial burden of mishaps. It became away to let the employee know that even in the topsy-turvy world of re-engineering, reorganization, cost cutting and other tough survival activities that the organization has to undertake, that it still cares about the employee.

The Reality

There are three types of behaviors that make up the pool of atrisk behavior in any work environment and different types of interventions to deal with these very different types of behavior. It is also the case that the same behavior cw fall into any of the three categories at any time depending on the circumstances. The three types of behavior are Enabled behavior, Non-Enabled behavior and, Difticult behavior.

1. Enabled Behavior.

This is behavior that the employee has discretionary control over. This is not to say that there are very valid and insidious reasons that the employee would not execute it properly. But it is a behavior that does not have some overt barrier to doing it the right way. In most cases the reason for the employee doing this behavior in a manner that is risky is that it seems very benign. This is due to for the most part to the fact that they have been repetitively doing it for long periods with no adverse consequences. In fact when it is done in the risky manner produces some very powerfid positive consequences. Some of these being speed or ease or less work etc; In most of these cases changing the physical system is not going to yield much change.

2. Non-Enabled Behavior.

This is the second and polar opposite of enabled behavior. This is a behavior the employee is not in control of. The system allows for one option, in the case of safety, usually that option is not the correct or least risky one. These situations demand some type of intervention strategy. This strategy almost always requires Human Factors Engineering. Without some formal change in the system the behavior has little or no chance of being changed.

3. Difficult Behavior.

This behavior is one that crosses both of tie above categories and is an interesting mix of both systems issues and perceptions. In the difficult category it seems that the issue is the imbalance of risk to