The Application of Behavioral Science for Safety: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a pilot study conducted to explore the feasibility and acceptability of providing coaching to a health, safety, and environment (HSE) team in the basics of behavioral science and human-centered design (behavioral design). The aim was to provide the team with a better understanding of human behavior and behavioral design principles and use this information to create impactful localized solutions to address key location-specific safety-related challenges. The HSE team was coached in the basics of behavioral science, with a focus on behavioral design. This included identifying, prioritizing, and measuring target behaviors; frameworks such as the capability, opportunity, motivation and behavior (COM-B) model to better understand performance-influencing factors and the behavior change wheel (BCW) to encourage a more holistic set of solutions; and pragmatic outcome and process evaluation, including how to design brief surveys and gather meaningful data to assess the impact and explore the acceptability of the solutions. The HSE team selected three key site-safety topic areas: pallet loading and transporting, flipping parts, and safe stair behaviors. The team embraced the process of designing solutions to enable safe behaviors, which involved holding structured sessions with employees and more data gathering than used in more traditional approaches to designing HSE solutions. The COM-B model was used to identify key behavioral barriers and the BCW to develop a holistic set of solutions, including technical solutions, persuasive communications, and nudges that focused on changing social norms and establishing habits. Process evaluation of the implemented project demonstrates that the solutions are positively impacting behavior, are acceptable to operational end users, have been low cost and highly feasible to implement. The HSE team also found significant benefit from the behavior change and human decision-making skills coaching. Finding pragmatic ways to positively influence human performance at the location level can be challenging, often because of a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of human decision-making, motivation, behavior and the skills needed to design feasible solutions that are cost effective and easy to implement. This feasibility study explored whether it would be possible to provide brief training and coaching to an HSE team in the basics of behavioral design to empower them to create localized solutions that go beyond changing mindsets. The paper describes the benefits of providing training and coaching for HSE teams, site managers, and other key decision-makers in the basics of behavioral science to supplement more general human factors training to maximize the impact of initiatives designed to enhance human performance, outline next steps, and key learnings.