Success of BBS Across Industries

Success of BBS applications has been found across a great variety of industries. Evidence of this is provided by critical appraisals of the BBS approach and examination of studies evaluating BBS interventions that have involved a cross-section of industrial sectors.

McAfee and Winn (1989) reviewed 24 studies that investigated the effectiveness of behavioural approaches that used incentives and/or feedback in commercial organisations.They affirmed that all without exception showed improvement in safety performance through reduction of injury figures and/or an enhancement of safety-related conditions.  Similarly, Guastello (1993) examined the effectiveness of 53 accident prevention programmes, noting, “behavior modification techniques are potentially useful in many industries”.

Whilst extremely positive, these evaluative examinations were restricted by time and have also been criticised for including too few studies. A more longitudinal study was carried out in 1999, which went beyond examining previous studies by investigating industrial approaches directly. Krause et al (1999) conducted a thorough examination of 73 BBS applications in the US over a five-year period, revealing highly significant success rates of the approach across sites. Safety performance based on the measure of improvement of injury rate was found to have an average increase of 26 percent after the first year of the approach being implemented and an average of 69% increase by the fifth year. This research involved a good cross-section of industrial sectors, including paper, petroleum, chemical, and food.

At first sight, this bodes well for extractive operations contemplating to take up this apparently versatile approach.  However, the occupational settings of quarrying or mining have not been adequately represented in appraisals. This lack of representation is likely due to the limited number of researchers that have tried and tested the BBS programme in quarry or mine sites.