The primary purpose of measuring health and safety performance is to provide regular and constructive feedback on the progress or status of any given strategy being used to control health and safety risks to your workers.
Unfortunately, it’s too easy to measure the wrong things—or not enough of the right things. When injury and illness measures are seen as just data, we can miss important road signs, misinterpret information, and divert our priorities or management direction. Under-reporting claims, sometimes an unintended effect of a safety incentive program, will distort your numbers. Non-reporting can also create a potentially costly claim situation.
A low injury rate, especially in a small company, has few data points, so there’s little or no statistical validity in its analysis. There has to be an injury to get a data point. That’s not what anybody wants. What every program needs is a mix of relevant measures that demonstrate what you are, or are not, doing right.
Common Measures
The most common measures of health and safety performance are insurance loss run reviews, accident/incident rates, OSHA DART or TRIR rates (Days Away, Restricted or Transferred and Total Recordable Incident Rate, respectively), and the Experience Modification Rate (also called an EMR, mod, mod rate, etc.).
Loss Runs are nothing more than a list of accident claims and their respective costs. They have legitimate value and your Moreton & Company account team uses them often. They show you both the frequency and severity of accidents and their costs in a clear and graphic way. You can quickly calculate totals and averages, spot recurring injuries, and analyze injury trends, but they are not a measure of your safety activity or effort, per se. They are a closely cropped snapshot. If you have fewer accidents this year than you did in the same period last year, you can’t tell if it’s a result of having hired better people and trained them better, lay-offs in a problematic department, production being down, or just pure luck.
Experience modifiers (EMR) are another kind of scorecard, but they take longer to develop and their sting is felt for four years. Like loss runs, experience modifier worksheets have some value but should be understood for what they are: a document created by the insurance industry for premium pricing and forecasting. The best an EMR does is provide management with a financial incentive for loss control.
OSHA’s DART/TRIR rates are another way of measuring the impact of work-related injuries, but with the advantage of measuring as a rate. So as your workforce and payroll fluctuates, seasonally or with economic cycles, you can still get a good measure of performance that compares fairly and consistently to other years or to your entire industry (industry DART/TRIR data is available at www.osha.gov/oshstats/index.html). They are also a better indicator of the frequency and severity of an employer’s accident history than an EMR, although it is still based on past events.
The rate is a simple formula, based on a constant of 100 workers working full-time for one year, or 200,000 man-hours. The value x equals the total days away from work, days on restricted or modified duty and/or transferred to another job.
While all these measures can be useful, they are still what we call ‘lagging indicators.’ They’re historical, after the fact. For a good combination of measures you’ll need to add leading indicators to the mix.
Measuring With Leading Indicators
A good way to look at leading indicators is as key performance indicators. Key performance indicators look at systems, in this case your safety management system. Look at what activities you perform and what systems you have in place to drive your health and safety performance in a positive direction and measure those activities to see that they produce constructive outcomes. Positive activities lead to positive outcomes.
Leading indicators are much more useful in helping you develop policies and practices that actually prevent incidents and accidents. They measure your strategic activity in the workplace before an accident or incident and your response immediately following an accident or incident. They can tell you if you are doing enough to produce the changes or outcomes you’re after. Some examples of repeatable and measurable key performance indicators might be:
- The percentage of meetings your health and safety committee holds regularly, as scheduled, and with full attendance, and what they accomplish, such as observations, recommendations, and the prompt resolution of action items
- ‘First Hour, First Day’ safety orientation for all new or transferred employees
- Formal safety trainings, based on needs assessments, that are provided and documented
- The number and frequency of health and safety toolbox talks completed
- Inspections or incident/accident investigations completed in a certain period
- Benchmarks showing progress toward specific improvements
- Health and safety program audits
- Observations and improvement suggestions by employees
- JHAs (Job Hazard Analysis) completed or updated
- Performance appraisals with a safety component
- Work comp claims that are filed promptly
- Pre-hire, post-accident, and “for cause” drug testing performed as required and testing records kept
By measuring these activities, or whatever measures best suit your operations, you can proactively manage safety, rather than just react to accidents. With good management come reliable, proactive strategies and follow-through, employee involvement, and, with time, a positive shift in the safety culture of your company. That’s when employees start doing the right thing independently, instinctively, and when no one is watching.
Putting It All Together
- An accident is an unfortunate and undesirable incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, resulting in injury or property damage. An incident has all the dynamics of an accident, but without the injury or property damage. There is a difference, but for the purposes of practical safety management they should be treated the same.
- To be most effective, set SMART goals at all levels of your organization (SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Tangible).
- Use a combination of lagging and leading indicators, reactive and proactive measures, to assess your strategies and your progress.
- Plan ways to gather all the information and only the information you need to best measure what you should measure for your employees’ safety and your company’s productivity and profitability. Don’t waste time with metrics that aren’t constructive.
- Use the measures that give you a broad and deep assessment of systems and processes, the skills and knowledge of both new and seasoned employees, and worker behaviors, attitudes and perceptions.
- With practical and informative program measures you’ll see fruitful progress of your safety efforts in real time. With a clear picture of progress, and sound management practices, you will soon control your workers’ compensation claims instead of them controlling you.
