What Is Safety Behavior — And Why Should Your Campaign Be Built Around It?

In Brief

• Safety behavior encompasses three distinct types: compliance (following rules, procedures, using PPE) and participation (discretionary behaviors like stopping work, reporting hazards and speaking up about unsafe conditions), and risk-taking.
• Awareness campaigns are structurally insufficient — knowing about a risk does not reliably translate into behavioral change.
• A systematic review of 39 peer-reviewed studies found that safety behavior is shaped simultaneously by individual, social, organizational, and environmental factors — not knowledge alone.
• Effective HSE campaigns begin with a diagnosis of which type of behavior to change and which specific factors are preventing it in that workforce and context.

The worker knows the rules. He's sat through the training, signed the acknowledgment form, and watched the mandatory induction video. And yet, on a Tuesday morning with a deadline pressing and no supervisor in sight, he moves along the scaffold without clipping in. Not because he's reckless or because he doesn't know better. Because clipping in takes thirty seconds he doesn't have, the clip is awkward at that angle, and no one is watching.

This is not a knowledge problem. It is a behavior problem. And the distinction matters enormously — because most workplace safety communication is designed to solve the first one.

About This Research

This post draws on Safety Behaviors and Behavioral Science Approaches in High-Hazard Industries: A Systematic Review Report by Dr Khaleda Ahmadyar (April 2026). Conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, the review synthesizes 39 peer-reviewed studies published between 1995 and 2026, spanning more than 20 countries and six high-hazard industries: construction, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, oil and gas, and transportation. It is the most comprehensive cross-industry synthesis of safety behavior determinants and behavioral science interventions currently available.

Download the full report free →

What Is Safety Behavior, and How Do Researchers Define It?

For decades, the dominant logic in occupational health, safety and environment (HSE) communication has been what scholars call the Information Deficit Model: the assumption that unsafe behavior is primarily a product of lack of knowledge, and that campaigns should therefore focus on closing the gap. Give workers the facts, make them aware of the risks, and behavior will follow. It is an appealing model. It is also, the research consistently shows, wrong.

Researchers who study occupational safety distinguish between two broad categories of safe behavior, a framework established by Neal and Griffin in 2000 that has since become the dominant model in the field. The first is safety compliance: the behaviors workers are required to perform — following procedures, using protective equipment, adhering to protocols. This is the floor. The second is safety participation: the discretionary behaviors that go beyond the minimum — proactively reporting hazards, looking out for colleagues, voicing concerns, engaging voluntarily with safety initiatives. This is where safety culture lives, and where the difference between a workforce that merely avoids accidents and one that actively prevents them is made.

A third category deserves equal attention: unsafe and risk-taking behaviors, including the everyday shortcuts that rarely appear in incident reports until they do. Reducing these behaviors is not the same challenge as increasing compliance or participation, and a campaign designed to address one will not automatically address the others. Understanding which of these your program is targeting is the first and most consequential design decision you will make.

The Scale of the Problem

High-hazard industries continue to report disproportionately high rates of occupational fatalities and injuries globally — a pattern that decades of regulation have not reversed (International Labour Organization, 2023). Human behavior is consistently identified as a critical determinant of safety outcomes, more so than equipment failures or inadequate rules (Reason, 2016). Non-compliance and risk-taking appear across industries and geographies as the most common contributing factors in workplace accidents.

The 39-study review makes the behavioral dimension of this problem concrete: workers who know the rules still take shortcuts. Workers who care about going home safe still comply inconsistently. Because knowing is not the same as doing. The factors that shape whether workers actually behave safely operate at multiple levels simultaneously — individual psychology, social norms, organizational culture, and the physical environment. Campaigns that target only the cognitive layer leave most of the picture unaddressed.

What's preventing safe behavior in your industry?

The full report maps barriers and drivers across all six high-hazard sectors — with direct implications for how communication campaigns should be designed and targeted.

Download the report →

Why the Starting Point for Every Campaign Must Be a Diagnosis

Effective safety communication does not begin with a message. It begins with a question: what type of safety behavior is the campaign trying to change, in whom, under what conditions, and what individual, social, organizational, or environmental factors are most actively shaping that behavior in this specific context?

Those questions — not best-practice templates, not awareness calendars, not impression counts — are what should determine campaign strategy. The rest of this series explores each dimension of that diagnosis in turn, drawing throughout on the systematic review of 39 studies.

• The Real Reasons Workers Cut Corners → — the multilevel barrier evidence, from optimism bias and psychological strain to peer norms and production pressure.
• What Leads Workers to Choose Safety → — the most consistently supported drivers of safe behavior, and how they vary by industry.
• Behavioral Science Has a Toolkit → — the frameworks the field offers, and why most safety programs aren't using the most powerful ones.
• What the Evidence Says About Safety Interventions → — what structured safety programs actually achieve, and what determines whether they succeed.

Because every worker deserves to go home. And science transforms awareness into real action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between safety compliance and safety participation?

Safety compliance refers to the required behaviors workers must perform — following procedures, using PPE, adhering to protocols. Safety participation refers to discretionary behaviors beyond the minimum, such as proactively reporting hazards, helping colleagues, or voluntarily engaging with safety initiatives. Both are important but represent different targets for communication and intervention.

Why do awareness campaigns fail to change safety behavior?

Awareness campaigns operate on the Information Deficit Model — the assumption that people behave unsafely because they lack knowledge. Research consistently shows this is rarely the primary barrier. Safety behavior is shaped by psychological strain, peer norms, organizational climate, and physical environment. Campaigns that address only knowledge leave the most powerful influences on behavior untouched.

What does "safety behavior" mean in the context of high-hazard industries?

In occupational safety research, safety behavior refers to the full range of actions workers take — or fail to take — that influence their exposure to workplace risk. This includes required behaviors like PPE use and procedure adherence, discretionary behaviors like hazard reporting and peer accountability, and unsafe behaviors like shortcuts and non-compliance. Each type requires a different communication campaign approach.

References

About Bottlenose

Bottlenose is a behavior-change communication agency built for high-risk environments. Our purpose is to protect people's lives by applying behavioral science to workplace communication — guiding safer everyday decisions and fostering a culture of health, safety and environment.

Our name is inspired by the bottlenose dolphin: an intelligent, collaborative species known for guiding and protecting through gentle nudges and coordinated behavior. Just as dolphins influence one another through subtle prompts and shared awareness, we help organizations influence safer actions through thoughtful, evidence-based communication.

We design creative, science-backed campaigns that help employees make safer decisions — from reporting hazards and speaking up about unsafe work to reducing distracted driving and improving PPE compliance.

Want to go deeper? Access the systematic review behind this series — or reach out to explore what a behavior-change campaign could look like for your organization.

Download the Systematic Review → | Get in touch →