7 Safety Metrics You Need to Start Tracking Now
Table of Contents
Incidents
Hazard assessments and inspections
Safety behaviors
Close calls
Training and education
Worker safety concerns and comments
Job safety analysis
Safety protection and peace of mind
Every year, more and more online tracking tools are becoming available, providing an unprecedented range and amount of safety data that can be used to protect workers. There are many types of valuable safety data that you can now track, but here at SafetyLine, we’ve helped you out by narrowing down that long list to 7 crucial safety metrics that you need to leverage and start tracking now to provide the best protection for your team from any existing or potentials hazards in the workplace.
1. Incidents
The most obvious metric in this list, you must keep track of the number of incidents that occur at your workplace. Employers need to know their Total Case Incident Rate (TCIR). To calculate this rate, you only need to take the number of workplace incidents and illnesses and multiply it by 200,000, which represents the number of hours that 100 employees would work per week during a calendar year. Once you have this number, divide it by the total number of hours that your employees have worked and that number is your TCIR.
2. Hazard assessments and inspections
Every organization must assess and inspect any existing or potential safety hazards that are threat to your workers. As work conditions can change over time, safety hazard and risk assessments must be conducted regularly and any new hazards must be addressed and mitigated immediately. Safety hazard assessments are the first, important step in identifying and eliminating any hazards preventing your workers from doing their jobs in a secure environment.
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3. Safety behaviors
As a manager, it is part of your job to monitor any existing or lacking safety behaviors amongst the team. This metric is a little less clear as these observations can be subjective according to who is documenting them. However, it is up to the manager to observe safety behaviors to determine if they are adequate and effective, as well as ways to improve these behaviors so that the safety risk is lowered. Because this data is more qualitative than quantitative, you must be incredibly consistent, using the same review or report structure for every employee.
4. Close calls
On top of recording incident metrics, you should also document any close calls that your team members have experienced with an accident or injury. Think of the events as second chances – nobody was hurt this time and it’s an opportunity to put measures into place that will prevent the close call from happening again. These close calls are also an opportunity to connect with and engage the team, discussing the factors that led up to the close call and what can be changed so that it won’t take place again.
5. Training and education
Speaking of connecting with the team, safety training and education metrics are important in that you can see who has attended any safety sessions, lunch-and-learns, and/or workshops, as well as how well they understand safety protocols. These sessions are also great avenues to bring the team together on issues that impact all of them, ensuring that your team is on the same page and are safer as a result. You don’t necessarily need to test your team, but make sure you follow up, individually, if possible, to make sure they have retained any important safety knowledge and awareness.
6. Worker safety concerns and comments
During the training and workshops, it shouldn’t be a one-way street in that the instructor is strictly talking to those in attendance. There needs to be an exchange in dialogue and ideas, a safe place where staff can voice any safety concerns or comments. As a manager, these are valuable moments in that you are shown the perspectives that matter the most – the viewpoints of your team whose safety will be impacted.
7. Job safety analysis
In addition to regular hazard assessments and inspections, job safety analysis (JSA) is an important metric to build a strong safety culture amongst your team. JSA is a process of looking at a work task and considering what is the safest way to complete it. JSA includes four steps that provide valuable information for your safety program. These steps include:
selecting the job to be analyzed
breaking the job down into a sequence of steps
identifying potential hazards
determining preventive measures to overcome these hazards
The power of JSA is that it’s a formal, documented process that analyses each area of the job for safety hazards and risks.
Learn more on our blog article: What is Job Safety Analysis?
Safety protection and peace of mind
As we said before, with ongoing, developing technology and data tracking tools, there are a large, growing number of safety metrics that can be used to proactively protect your team, or, in the unfortunate case of an incident, can be leveraged to prevent any future emergencies and accidents. Not only will your team be much safer, but as a manager, you will have peace of mind that there are plans and protocols in place protecting their well-being.
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