BST is a global safety consulting firm that helps companies reduce occupational injuries, improve organizational functioning, and develop strong safety leadership. Started in 1979, BST pioneered the application of behavioral science to safety performance. Today, the BST approach includes an exposure-reduction mechanism, predictive diagnostic tools and interventions for culture and leadership, and methods that engage employees across levels in active safety roles.
Organizations implementing BST's comprehensive approach to safety realize an average 40% reduction in injuries the first year alone, along with substantial improvements in business functioning, productivity, and morale. BST is the safety provider of choice for many of the world's leading companies in oil &gas, manufacturing, chemical, mining, metals, paper, transportation, consumer products, utilities, healthcare, and other critical industries.
BST's corporate headquarters are based in the United States, with regional offices in Brazil, Belgium, South Africa, Australia, and Singapore.
Rebecca Nigel
Behavioral Science Technology, Inc.
Phone: +1 805 665 6145
Email:
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Good safety performance is critical in any workplace where people interact with technology. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, work-related accidents injure more than four million workers, and cause more than 5,000 worker fatalities, every year. Workplace injuries are estimated to cost U.S. businesses in excess of $120 billion dollars annually.
Safety management methods have traditionally treated injury prevention at the local level with an emphasis on loss prevention. In recent years, organizations have begun to recognize an inherent link between safety and business. Studies of industrial accidents show that the immediate causes of an event are commonly traceable to the configuration of an organization's processes, procedures, decision-making, and culture—all factors that affect overall business functioning.
Today, forward-thinking organizations are using safety as a platform for business excellence. These companies see employee health and wellbeing as the first line of defense in corporate sustainability, profitability, and growth.
Key BST findings about safety and business:
- Companies highly successful in safety are also successful in operational performance generally, but the reverse is not always true.
- The quality of a company's leadership, and the resulting organizational culture, predicts the level of success in safety
- There are at least nine dimensions of organizational culture that predict safety outcomes; sites with higher scores on these dimensions experience fewer injuries.
- These nine culture factors also predict critical business indicators such as job satisfaction, absenteeism, and ethical performance.
- Founded in 1979 by Thomas R. Krause, Ph.D. and John H. Hidley, M.D.
- BST's staff includes 175 employees in 17 countries
- BST solutions have been implemented at more than 2,300 work sites in 60 countries
- BST solutions have been applied in more than 30 languages
- BST's comprehensive approach to safety is shown to help clients realize an average 40% reduction in injury rates the first year
- Privately-held, BST has realized over 100% growth the past five years alone
- Consultants average more than 20 years of experience in their fields of expertise.
- BST's headquarters are located in Ojai, California.
- BST has regional offices in Brazil, Switzerland, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, and Austin, Texas.
BST clients have some great stories to tell. This page represents a small sample of the types of improvements and initiatives taking place around the world.
Leading with Safety at Columbia Forest Products
Leading with Safety at Columbia Forest Products
How this 8-mill division reduced injuries 27% in 24 months
Columbia Forest Products (CFP) is North America's largest manufacturer of hardwood plywood and hardwood veneer products, and through its subsidiary Columbia Flooring, the leading producer of hardwood and laminate flooring. The 49-year old employee-owned company has 17 manufacturing locations in the United States and Canada, and prides itself on its spirit of innovation and employee empowerment. In 2004, the company's eight-site, 2,800-employee plywood division initiated a new safety effort that would extend from the shopfloor to the division level. HR Director Don Carter and plywood president Brad Thompson, recognized that safety could be a platform for motivation and engagement. To do that, however, they needed a set of safety systems and practices as robust as other business management systems the company relied on.
Improving Safety at Akzo Nobel
Improving Safety at Akzo Nobel
Achieving three years without a lost time incident
In March 2007, global industry giant Akzo Nobel's Surfactants Europe sub-business unit facility in Stockvik, Sweden, marked three years without a lost time injury (LTI). Site leaders believe their employee-driven safety process has been an important factor in attaining this milestone. Facilitator Sven Andersson says, "The biggest problem when it comes to safety is to change people's habits in their daily work. It's difficult to identify a risk in working procedures when you have been doing the same job for years." Site leaders also credit management support with helping sustain good results from the employee-driven process.
Namakwa Sands
Namakwa Sands
Reducing injuries by 54%
Namakwa Sands is a heavy minerals mining and beneficiation business that operates along the west coast of South Africa. The site produces three heavy minerals: zircon, rutile and ilmenite. Titania slag and pig iron are produced from ilmenite in a smelter near the Saldanha Bay export harbour. Constructed in 1993-1994 and fully commissioned and operational by 1995, the site took great pains to train its young workforce of approximately 900 employees in accordance with compliance regulations for safety. In 2003, Namakwa Sands called on Behaviour Based Initiatives, BST's affiliate in South Africa, to integrate an employee-driven safety approach and a "top-down" management initiative with the site's existing safety efforts. Within three years, this site reduced total recordable injuries by 54%.
A full list of BST's clients is available here.
BST Experts
BST's Senior Leadership Team comprises dedicated and knowledgeable professionals from diverse backgrounds including leadership development, organizational functioning, industrial psychology, safety science, change management, and statistical analysis. They speak widely on latest research, best practices, and advancements in safety performance improvement.
BST offers a unique perspective on workplace safety, performance and leadership. Below are just a few of the topics that BST can speak to.
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for more information or to arrange an interview.
What History Teaches Us About the Role of Leaders in Organizational Safety
The 2007 Baker report on the explosion at BP's Texas City refinery in 2005 raised important questions about process safety for any major organization. At the same time, this report's information was not exactly new; it shared the same basic findings that characterize several other benchmark disasters of the modern age, such as Union Carbide Bhopal and NASA's Columbia. Why is it that the repeated and replicable lessons about industrial and technological safety are so difficult for modern organizations to learn? Research literature points out that specific, discrete, measurable dimensions of organizational culture predict the occasion of disastrous outcomes and specific leadership behaviors and competencies correlate with those cultural dimensions. What do these findings tells us and what are their implications for culture and leadership? What concrete steps can leaders take to assure the integrity of process and personal safety systems?
Culture, Safety and Business: Nine dimensions critical to safety performance
Research points to nine dimensions of organizational culture that define the optimal conditions for safety functioning. Not surprisingly, these include factors such as the level to which employees pass along safety-critical information or their willingness to speak to coworkers about safety. What is surprising is that six of these nine factors are not safety specific at all. What are these factors and what do they imply about organizational functioning?
Does Business Have a Double Standard When it Comes to Safety? Paying Attention to Workplace Fatalities
CEOs and their proxies, who can't afford the luxury of random business outcomes, rightly refuse to explain poor production, low quality, or adverse financial results as "bad luck." Yet many of the same leaders continue to accept major safety failures as just that. The idea that fatalities are random—indeed, inevitable—so permeates industry that many organizations routinely treat on-the-job deaths singly and after the fact, rather than as preventable events that require aggressive upstream management just like other business results.
A New Kind of Globalization: How Safety is Helping Organizations Rethink Their Assumptions About Local Cultures
Achieving excellence in safety, like business in general, poses special challenges to organizations with a global presence. Perhaps the greatest barrier to success is the perception that local culture determines outcomes. We commonly hear people say, "People there just don't value safety," or "Workers in that region aren't very educated (or smart)." These assumptions not only skew the facts, they create a sense of helplessness that undermines the potential for high performance. Emerging evidence from hundreds of organizations engaged in safety initiatives is disproving this idea. It turns out that the "what" of safety and operational excellence is consistent everywhere: it is the "how" that changes.
The Business Case for Injury Prevention: Why Good Safety is Good Business
Workplace injuries are estimated to cost U.S. businesses in excess of $120 billion dollars annually. And this does not begin to account for the substantial opportunity costs that poor safety performance has on operational capabilities. What is data telling us about the link between safety and business outcomes and what does that mean for running your business?
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