The economic burden that workplace accidents come bundled with is worth 3.94% of the global gross domestic product annually, according to the International Labor Organization. While this might seem like a small burden, it becomes even much tougher when it affects a single organization. Experiencing workplace injuries can easily stretch your budget as you cater for compensation claims and the resulting aftermath.
What’s even worse is that employee morale and satisfaction rates drop dramatically once a fatal accident occurs in their working environment, reducing productivity. To steer away from such an experience, the onus lies on the management to look beyond the standard regulations and workplace safety measures to fortify the level of safety that they offer their employees.
One strategy that could come in handy in enhancing safety is to embrace behavior-based safety (BBS) in their workforce. Here’s what makes BBS a great path to walk as an organization:
What Is Behavior-Based Safety?
No matter how well integrated your organization’s safety measures are, they will be of no use as long as employees ignore them. Behavior-based safety aims at harnessing the power of behavior psychology to embrace workplace safety through employee involvement. It initially involves the identification of issues that can result in employees’ harm within their environment.
These practices can be turned into a checklist where employees can determine actions that make their environment safe or unsafe. For instance, in an area that has a high risk of exposure to a refinery explosion accident, employees can point out using dirty chemicals as a hazard, as noted by workers compensation lawyers atThe Doan Law Firm. Afterward, the employee teams can come up with actionable plans for continuous improvement of their workplace safety.
Benefits of BBS
BBS allows organizations to focus on the intricate details of employee actions that can result in their harm, and provide actionable feedback that can reduce exposure to any peril. Other than enhanced safety, the organization enjoys some more benefits in return. Employees become more satisfied with their work environment which means increased productivity levels.
Companies can also reduce, if not eliminate, the compensation costs related to workplace accidents. Additionally, the cost that is linked to an employee being absent due to health issues can be significantly reduced. Implementing any effective workplace safety strategy helps save businesses a significant amount of operational costs directly related to employees’ availability.
Why Does BBS Work?
By paying keen attention to the behavior of their employees, managers can adjust their workflow processes and harness new task analysis techniques to come up with new strategies which can help eliminate physical, ergonomic and mechanical hazards for the employee. This enhanced attention to detail helps build a safe working atmosphere. Additionally, since employees are empowered to be accountable for their own behavior in the work environment, their critical thinking and decision making practices improve along with their work engagement rates.
Tracking behavior further ensures that the safety training expectations are met by the employees. In addition to reducing risks and workplace accidents, behavior-based safety strategies can further help in identifying areas within the training program that need to be revisited to refine the safety procedures.
BBS Has A Few Challenges
Behavior-based safety is, by no means, a quick fix to all of your organization’s safety challenges. There are a few issues that need to be addressed for successful implementation. First, most companies will have overconfident or complacent employees. The challenge comes in where you need to explain to them why observing their work behavior is necessary – incentives can be quite handy in doing som as noted by the Economic Times.
