Implementation of BBS and the Impact of Site-Level Commitment

This work presents the results of a case study and addresses an important area within the field of construction safety management, namely behavior-based safety (BBS). The study investigates the implementation process of the BBS management approach and assesses how the commitment of site-level management, BBS implementation observers, and operatives' impact on safety performance by using data collected from construction sites located in Hong Kong. While achieving the set objectives, this work provoked several aspects of education, training, and engineer's obligations towards managing safety on construction sites. The research introduces BBS practices in five categories: personal protective equipment, house keeping, access to heights, plant and equipment, and scaffolding. Intervention was introduced and its impacts on site safety were monitored and analyzed. The results revealed that improvement in safety performance was higher when the site-management team was more committed to implementing the intervention. The results confirm that the BBS technique based on goal setting and feedback arrangements can be applied to construction sites to deliver better project safety performance. Managerial implications of these findings are discussed, and guidelines for how project managers, safety professionals, and construction safety practitioners can better implement the BBS approach are also proposed. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000111. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.