The Singapore Land Transport Authority Contract C917A is for the design, construction and completion of all outstanding works under the original Contract 917, including taking over the design and construction responsibility for the works carried out by previous contractor. Construction works connect the bored tunnels between the stations at King Albert Park and Sixth Avenue on the Downtown Line two in Singapore.The original contractor became insolvent leaving the works incomplete. On 29 August 2013 McConnell Dowell were awarded the completion contract following a fast-tracked tender process. The completion contract required a quick start and therefore the recruitment of some of the original workforce. A large majority of the original workforce was from Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Philippines, Bangladesh, India and Thailand. In order to ensure that the safety standards were upheld, and that the new workforce embraced a safety culture, a behaviour based safety (BBS) approach was implemented.The BBS approach was implemented to overcome the existing poor cultural safety behaviours, and to ensure that high standards and expectations for safety were implemented. This ensured that the workforce were comfortable in identifying hazards, avoiding shortcuts, and changing poor safety behaviours.This article outlines how a BBS program was delivered on the C917A project, containing defined goals, communication tools, and assessment and feedback models.CITATION:Brown, R, 2014. Behaviour-based safety with a foreign-based workforce, in Proceedings 15th Australasian Tunnelling Conference 2014 , pp 65-68 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).