Behavioural Safety Hazards: Examples and How to Avoid Them

Healthy and safety procedures underpin a secure and hazard-free work environment. Their existence, fortified by the inception of the Health & Safety Executive in 1975, aims to prevent injury and death at the workplace.

While health and safety sound like a piece of policy design that can only have positive outcomes, not all agree.

Often the source of derision for being overprotective, the concept of the ‘nanny state’ surrounding health and safety has led to behavioural safety hazards, many as a direct result of individuals and organisations being careless with their health and safety attitudes.

For some, there is a mental resistance to health & safety that means hazards can develop, and injury or death can occur. But how significant is this problem, and what can be done to address it?

Our guide to behavioural safety hazards looks at some common examples and what actions can be taken to build awareness and avoid unnecessary workplace casualties.

How Habitual Behaviours Reinforce Safety Risks

Habits can create risk.

A simple behavioural safety hazard born from habitual practice is not wearing safety equipment to perform a task. The worker may have always performed the task without the latest equipment, so their attitude to the new equipment is that it’s irrelevant and unnecessary to stay safe.

It’s not about disobedience but ignorance and misconceptions.

The worker plays with the rules of probability, just as you would if you got into your car and didn’t put on your seatbelt. Probability suggests you’ll be okay, yet a third of road-related deaths involved people not wearing their seatbelt. Hundreds of thousands of people don’t wear seatbelts, and the majority of them survive, yet many thousands also perish.

Habitual risks become worse when health and safety impedes task completion. The new equipment makes the task more difficult or perhaps slows the job down. There is the temptation to follow behavioural patterns instead of process, ignore the latest equipment and follow habitual practice.

Why not? It works?

Changing habitual patterns is about changing behaviours not towards the health and safety process but the risk itself. Proper training and education should focus on a sales and marketing style of engagement. Sales tactics emphasise the reward of the purchase, and so too should health and safety emphasise the reward of following protocol.

The rules must be more than rules and have tangible benefits, whether it’s keeping others safe, preventing a broken leg and so on.

Driver awareness courses make the risks real by showing accident scenes and recounting stories of injury and death. They aren’t simply saying speeding is the law; follow the law, they’re saying speeding hurts people, and this is how.

The message is simple when breaking such behaviours: This is how your supposedly harmless habit can get you and your colleagues injured or killed.

Resistance to Health & Safety & Addressing Behavioural Hazards

Humans are genetically hardwired to resist change; it’s in our DNA. We seek to retain the status quo, and when it comes to health and safety, that can come at the cost of our health and our safety.

An example of this behavioural hazard would be doing things the old way. Workers used to be able to walk wherever they wanted around a warehouse, but new signage has introduced one-way zones. Workers resist, walking where they should because their status quo drive keeps them following the same path.

This is different from habitual because habitual behaviour says, I’ve done this before, and it worked, so I’ll do it again. Resistance to change is all about knowing the hazards but putting yourself in their path anyway because of an inability to accept the new working process.

In this situation, outlining real and tangible risks isn’t going to work. Some people will see the driver awareness course, view the risks of injury and death, and still not wear a seatbelt while speeding because of their aversion to change.

However, like habitual behaviours, this is not intentional and direct insubordination but an inability to adapt.

So then, how do we avoid this behavioural safety hazard?

Resistance to change comes from our primitive, monkey brain. It’s all to do with our cognitive-bias and our unconscious reasoning. A part of the human brain, the amygdala, which deals with fear and response to threat, gets fired up by change. By being pulled from our comfort zone, we can actually experience strong negative emotions. Some individuals have more active amygdalas than others, which present more profound responses to change. This is one reason why some people are much more accepting of new health and safety rules than others.

It’s an instinctual behaviour.

The answer to mastering these unconscious behavioural processes is to engage in other unconscious patterns. While our brains are wired to resist change, they are also wired to respond positively to confident people that we respect. In a caveman society, the confident people — those who knew what they were doing — were the ones more likely to survive. We are naturally drawn to these people. We listen to them and follow them because they give us reassurance in our actions, reassurance that we feel we can trust.

Health and safety directives and procedures can come from faceless corporations or an OSH (occupational safety and health) employee who appears once in a while, throws a bunch of rules at the workforce and leaves.

Our primitive brains do not respond to this kind of interaction well.

The key to negating resistance to change, and avoiding behavioural health and safety hazards, is to have education, training and rule enforcement managed and implemented by a person that inspires confidence and assurance. They need to be a leader, a figure of authority and an expert, somebody who can engage and understand and — perhaps most importantly — motivate. Top down leadership for all health and safety matters within an organisation is crucial, this includes behavioural safety.

In short, think carefully about WHO is presenting your health and safety information and HOW it is presented. Think about WHY people would have reason to ignore health and safety and follow behaviours that lead to hazards. 

Recognising Behavioural Safety Hazards Might Be About What is Acceptable to Ignore

Health and safety policy often has an uncrossable line. The point of no return. If going beyond this means the only recourse is termination, you’ll rarely find people go past this point. But individuals who refuse to follow the rules may instead go down a different path.

They’ll effectively get away with what they can.

If some people know there will be no resource for certain levels of rule-bending — except maybe a stern word or an email — then they’ll be more likely to disregard said rules, potentially at the expense of their own safety and others. For example, they drive a forklift through the centre of the factory floor, even when it should follow a designated safety corridor because they know nobody will say anything.

This behaviour is nothing short of insubordination, the worker has been told to zig, but they zag. There are two steps to dealing with this behavioural safety hazard:

The first is tough and strict regulations that are rigorously enforced. The rules need to be black and white, as do the consequences. Minor infractions of health and safety need to be taken seriously. A culture of nepotism must also be addressed if present, where senior staff members break the rules because they feel their seniority protects them. If no form of rule-breaking is acceptable at any level, then it’s not only easier to dissuade this behavioural hazard but also to remove those from your workplace that are found in breach of policy.

Eventually, the message either gets across, or there are no more rule-breakers left to dismiss.

Rule-breaking can only be acted upon if it is reported, which means you need the second step of your strategy, and that’s building a workforce willing to report disobedience. The culture of the workplace is essential to the enforcement of the rules. If nobody cares to follow health and safety protocol, those whose behaviour creates risk will not be reported and may not be discovered.

Developing a culture that self-regulates behavioural hazards is about embedding a sense of personal responsibility. If the majority of your workforce understand that breaking rules puts not only the rule breaker at risk but also their colleagues, then they’re more likely to feel an obligation, and a right, to get involved and report non-compliance.

The bottom line is, your workers need to believe that informing management of rule-breaking is the correct and justified course of action, rather than allowing their colleagues to get away with their actions. They need to have received the correct levels of education and insight to see for themselves that this person is doing something unacceptable, even if they’re a friend or a close co-worker.

It is important to encourage compliance by explaining to workers why following the rules is important, rather than just telling them to comply.

Some Behavioural Hazards Are Not Conscious

Adults forget three things a day.

Usually, they’re not important, but sometimes, they’re pretty essential. When it comes to health and safety, this could be forgetting to apply necessary safety procedures before leaving the workplace or as simple as using the wrong strength protection gloves when performing a task.

Forgetful behaviour can appear to be more challenging than conscious behaviour to overcome because the worker has no idea they’re at risk until they’ve made the mistake. However, there are simple ways to prevent this behaviour from impacting safety.

Memory is enforced by repetition. The more times we do something, the more entrenched it becomes in our brain. This is why regular training is the best way to become a professional and why you can drive to work in the morning without thinking about the direction you’re going. Eliminating the risk of forgetful behaviour is about adapting the subconscious to be aware of things, to get your workers essentially following health and safety automatically.

There are a few memory boosting techniques you can deploy to help this.

You can have new health & safety procedures repeated in test environments to get the worker used to them. You can also use an organisational process to make it easier for the memory to know what to do.

For example, in the scenario of using the wrong gloves for the job, you can put the gloves in a distinct location based on the job being completed, so rather than the worker having to remember the type of glove to wear, they instead only need to think about where to look for the glove they need. If they repeatedly go to the same location (a shelf, draw, workbench, box, etc.) for the equipment, they will build memory pathways, reducing the risk of forgetful behaviour.

Could the Biggest Behavioral Safety Threat Be Managerial Mindset?

There is a tendency amongst management to see human error and behaviour as the biggest cause of workplace accidents, with surveys suggesting up to 80% of incidents are caused by such problems. However, a report for the Health & Safety Executive by Martin Anderson, Specialist Inspector of Health & Safety, found that in many cases, it was the mindset of business management that was causing health & safety hazards, not employee behaviours at all.

Anderson’s report found, amongst many other organisational failures, that businesses were failing to effectively address health and safety through:

• the allocation of resources (equipment and personnel),
• the determination of priorities,
• planning and scheduling of work activities,
• levels of capital investment, (e.g. failing to replace out-of-date equipment),
• learning lessons from operating experience,
• management of change,
• competency assurance systems (including for managers),
• the control of contractors,
• approaches to health and safety management (e.g. focussing on those initiatives that are high profile with a perceived quick payback),
• risk analysis, audits and making decisions based upon such research.

In short, the report determines that while management focuses on front-line employees being the cause of health & safety incidents, the reality is that it is the behaviour of management that is creating hazards. A quote from Anderson’s document reads:

‘Creating the right mindset is not a strategy which can be effective in dealing with hazards about which workers have no knowledge and which can only be identified and controlled by management.’

If management is not effectively taking control of health and safety and investing the proper attention into securing their workers and avoiding hazards, their behavioural safety is putting people at risk and in a way that workers can do nothing about.

So how does management make sure it’s working to prevent behavioural safety concerns from the top level?

Health & safety accreditation is the best way to address this risk factor. Accreditation involves analysis, investigation and certification by a health & safety authority, such as CHAS. The accreditation process looks at all applicable standards and compliance measures that can and should be in place, plus an auditing process to ensure it’s up to the task.

By securing health & safety accreditation, management can know they’re not contributing to behavioural safety hazards in the workplace.

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