Behavioral Safety: A way to decrease injuries at work (with science)

Work-related injuries are a well known problem all around European Union (EU): every year, at least 170000 workers die and even more suffer severe and permanent injuries. Even if EU placed the goal of reducing this number by 25% by 2012, in many countries the situation remains unchanged despite the enforcement of increasingly stringent laws that, anyways, elude the most important question: why? Moreover, in spite of a lot of American and European studies demonstrated that at least 76% of work-related accidents are due to workers unsafe behaviors, blaming workers is not a effective solution because it eludes again the question: why a worker should act unsafe? An answer to this last question comes from studies about human behavior: a person acts a certain way because he is subject to a number of external stimuli, before and after his act. So, if a person receives a positive consequence as a reward for his behavior, he continues to output the same behavior. Till 80's, Behavior-Based Safety (B-BS) uses this mechanic to provide positive consequences to safe behaviors, instead of negative ones, increasing safety and reducing injuries. But does B-BS work? Even if a lot of literature case studies of successful B-BS implementation are present, all across the world, there is a lack of scientific experiments to unequivocally state that B-BS increases safe behaviors and reduces injuries. This work provides two different case studies, using not only a before-after analysis but also using an appropriate mathematical test (Young’s C Test), to examine workers’ behavior changes during time. The work puts in competition two different B-BS protocols, which share all the fundamentals but differ for start-up time and cost, applied on two different Italian industrial sites: a glass bottle factory and a paint factory. These protocols obtains the same results, demonstrating not only that B-BS works, but also that behavioral safety can be achieved at low cost even for small European industries.