ABSTRACT
Behavior-based safety (BBS) is a systematic approach to promoting behavioral support for injury prevention. The traditional BBS methodology requires to keep doing the observation and feedback until the worker accepts the inter-vention and is willing to try the suggested recommendations, no matter the intervention is taken by the supervisors or by workmates.
Although BBS has been extensively applied in many industries, it needs to be adapted to suit the demands and characteristics of the construction industry. Based on the authors’ experience of BBS implementation, the main challenges of BBS implementation in construction industry include: (1) the relatively poor safety culture in subcontractors and projects are not conducive for BBS implementation; (2) the general process of behavior selection in other industries will not be suitable for construction industry; (3) it would be hardly possible to accomplish the long term individual feedback to each employee as the traditional BBS scheme suggested.
In this paper, the causation model of unsafe behaviors has been developed focusing on both the individual and the management unsafe behaviors. Based on the model, the database of unsafe behaviors’ causations could be built to reveal the individual causes and management causes respectively. Consequently, the intervention scheme towards the two kinds of causations could be developed accordingly and specifically for construction industry.
Based on this model and the authors’ BBS practices in Mainland China, Hong Kong as well as in Singapore, useful methods and suggestions for improving the BBS implementation are recommended as follows: (1) conducting safety culture survey among all parties of the project to facilitate BBS implementation; (2) taking both the management unsafe behaviors and workers’ unsafe behaviors into account during the intervention period and correcting both of the two parts simultaneously; (3) emphasizing the involvement of foremen and supervisors in BBS implementation.
Keywords: Behavior based safety, Safety culture, Challenges, Construction.
