Many organizations use different Behavioral safety interventions. Some of the behavioral safety interventions involve setting goals and giving incentives. To measure the effectiveness of this interventions many organizations use injury reductions and behavioral change. However, the effectiveness of the approaches used in behavioral safety is determined by the function of the implementation.
Cooper (2009), advocates of behavioral safety, argue that it only involves the employees to carry out the safety measures while managers only play a significant role in carrying out the implementation .On the other hand critics disagree on the involvement of employees in the safety process arguing that such an idea had run its course.Just like any other safety interventions, behavioral safety procedures need a collective effort by both the management and the rest of the employees. In order for an organization to generate the appropriate results it must use the following management model: setting and clarifying the goals, indentifying the problems, carrying out the strategy for change, assessing the existing progress and reevaluate and acclimatizing the process.
Most of the organizations employ the behavioral safety interventions to reduce the number of incidents triggered by risky behavior. In order to attain this, an organization first identifies the behavioral issues by focusing on the incidents resulting from the dealings between the employees and the environment. This involves looking into the safety of the management systems functions and their quality. It also includes a focus on the financial and the non-financial resources, the quality of the leadership as well as the organizational safety culture. (Cooper, 2009).
Once the problems are identified, efforts are made to discover which antecedents result to the risky behaviors. For instance, the unavailability of tools and equipments could be solved by use of the cuff or improvised tools and equipments. It also involves identifying the consequences that reinforce or discourage the behavior.
The final step deals with implementing the change strategy; this involves dealing with the previous circumstances in order to remove the hurdles identified. It also involved identifying the related safety behaviors so that managers can observe the ongoing behavior of workers. The feedback from the observations is then used to monitor the progress of workers as far as behavioral safety is concerned and for corrective purposes. Trends identified overtime in the data collected are used to acclimatize the process to fit the specific circumstances in the organizations (Cooper, 2009).Behavioral safety has undergone some evolutionary Changes since its inception in the early 1970s.Many organizations mainly used the top —down approach .These was carried out by supervisors who would observe each workers behavior and then provide feedback so as to act appropriately. However, this approach was flawed since the safety behavior was only observed in the presence of supervisors. Currently, Most organizations use the concept of managerial and employee partnership. All parties involved that is the managers and employees receive usual feedback and some get incentives. Behavioral safety intervention is not only practiced by organizations in the United States but also across the world (Cooper, 2009).
Behavioral safety measures are based on similar psychological principles. Key structural mechanisms can affect the implementation of the behavioral safety in an organization, therefore there is need for an organization to create a cost effective method. This method should however produce positive results. Cooper (2009), an ideal behavioral safety program involves identifying unsafe behaviors obtained either from injury and incidents, which could turn fatalistic if safety measures were not put in place. It also involves creation of the suitable observation checklist, which contain actions that result to injury. Training and educating all personnel from and assessing the current safety behavior in the organization, by carrying out behavioral observation .Finally provision of verbal, graphical feedback and written results to all parties involved.