A behavioral safety audit is aimed at identifying, warning against, and preventing unsafe acts and unsafe conditions, as well as strengthening motivation and increasing the commitment of managers and employees to safety issues. This is achieved by explaining the consequences of behavior (unsafe acts) and the employee's presence in unsafe conditions during the audit process.
The BSA is intended for all company employees, as well as employees of third-party organizations.
Behavioral safety audit is a type of audit based on observing the actions of a specific employee (or group of employees) while they perform a work task, assessing the conditions under which the employee(s) perform the task, and conducting a subsequent conversation between the employee(s) and the auditor.
Safe act is an employee's action that allows work to be carried out in accordance with the applicable requirements without risk to life and health, or the occurrence of any other incident.
Safe condition is a workplace factor that complies with the requirements of current legislation and local regulations, including requirements that ensure the safe execution of work.
Observation categories are a set of audit criteria grouped by a common feature.
HSE culture is the professional and psychological readiness of all employees, where ensuring HSE is a priority goal and an internal need, leading to an awareness of personal responsibility and self-control when performing all tasks that affect HSE.
Unsafe act is an action or inaction by an employee that violates the requirements of current legislative, regulatory legal acts, and normative and administrative documents, resulting in an increased risk of injury to the employee or others, or the occurrence of another incident.
Unsafe condition is a workplace factor not directly related to the action or inaction of one or more employees, which can lead to an incident or injury if not eliminated.
The goals of the BSA are:
The objectives of the BSA are:
1. The BSA should be conducted by auditors trained in this process and should take place during working hours.
2. The BSA can be conducted in conjunction with internal audits and inspections at various levels of administrative and operational control.
The frequency of conducting BSAs, depending on the auditor's position, is recommended to be determined based on the following provisions:
A schedule must be drawn up for conducting BSAs.
3. The BSA should be conducted in the following order:
– comment on the employees' safe behavior, noting their efforts to perform the work safely;
– discuss other safety issues, talk through potential hazards and ways to identify, warn against, and prevent them;
– ask for the employees' suggestions on performing the work safely;
– thank the employees for their time.
– if the conditions/actions pose an immediate threat to the life and health of the employees, stop the work process;
– comment on the employees' safe behavior, noting their efforts to perform the work safely;
– discuss the employees' unsafe act, draw attention to the potential consequences, and ask how the work can be performed safely;
– secure the employees' agreement to work safely in the future;
– discuss other safety issues, talk through potential hazards and ways to identify, warn against, and prevent them. Ask for the employees' suggestions on performing the work safely;
– thank the employees for their time;
– if long-term corrective actions are needed to address the observations, it is recommended to discuss them with the employees' direct supervisor.
4. When conducting a BSA, the methodology for interviewing an employee should be used. A BSA results report should be compiled for each audit. If the BSA was conducted by a group of auditors, a single results report is compiled. The results report should indicate all identified unsafe conditions/acts. The BSA results report does not include the surnames and first names of the employees being audited, except in cases where the employee's conditions/actions require an immediate suspension of the work process and subsequent corrective actions.
5. Employees must not be punished based on the results of a BSA.
During the implementation of the BSA, the "alarm zone" of a specific department should be determined. The "alarm zone" is built on the basis of collected statistics of hazard indicator values over a selected period and is depicted as segments on the graph axes representing the observation categories. The intersection of the established "alarm zone" with the calculated area based on the results of the audit(s) can signal the presence of prerequisites for an incident. The "alarm zone" is determined by the site/department managers (in agreement with HSE specialists) based on the current injury situation for a specific facility.
It should be considered that the company strives to achieve a "zero alarm zone" in the course of its activities across various business processes.
6. The data processing results show which observation categories should be prioritized given the current level of HSE culture. Based on these results, HSE measures should be planned to reduce the number of violations by category and to manage risks within the HSE management system.