Setting Safety Goals for the Year
Table of Contents
Setting Safety Goals for the Year
Why is safety important?
Safety hazard and risk assessment
Establish safety goals
Set the team up for success
Build a solid health safety policy (occupational health and safety policy)
How do you measure success?
Already have safety goals?
Measuring health and safety performance
Occupational safety measurement terminology you need to know!
Occupational safety is a process
Now that we are approaching the end of January, employers and managers should have established safety goals for 2022 by now. If you haven’t yet, it’s never too late. It should be a major goal in itself for the employer to set safety goals and objectives for the upcoming year so the safety and health of workers and employees can improve and move forward.
Why is safety important?
“Why is safety important?” It might seem like an obvious one but it needs to be asked because different people and organizations can have a different answer, depending on the unique situation and circumstances in their industry.
However, there are some objectively undeniable reasons why occupational safety must be a top priority at your organization. These include the safety and well-being of the employee as well as some peace of mind with management. This can, in turn, protect the company from lawsuits and legal liability if occupational safety measures have been taken and safety is important. Additionally, there can be high return on investment (ROI) with savings in lost work and sick time, damage to equipment and/or infrastructure, as well as impact to operations and productivity.
Safety hazard and risk assessment
“If you have lone workers or employees working in isolation, you will need to conduct separate safety hazard and risk assessments for lone worker incidents and how to mitigate them.”
Before you start looking at setting any safety goals for the year, you need to assess the safety hazards and risks that your employees are facing. Conducting an exhaustive evaluation of the workspace and circumstances must obviously be performed for any current safety hazards but also the potential for hazards and risk of them harming the person, environment (including the public, wildlife, and infrastructure), or any work equipment. If you have lone workers or employees working in isolation, you will need to conduct separate safety hazard and risk assessments for lone worker incidents and how to mitigate them.
Establish safety goals
Once you have conducted safety hazard and risk assessments, then you can explore safety goals that will mitigate or eliminate the identified safety hazards. Some organizations will prioritize the goals according to the measure severity and risk of the hazard causing harm.
When phrasing the safety goal, make sure it’s simple and in one sentence if possible, allowing zero room for interpretation. Once you have that clear statement and goal, you can include any pertinent details below it in point form. For example:
Goal 1: All employees will take online CPR training
Everyone must complete the course by April1st.
Can be taken online and in person.
Send a staff-wide email by Feb 1.
Set the team up for success
Now that you have your goals, you need to look at, as a manager or employer, how you will empower the team to achieve these goals. That might mean a new app on their phones or safety training, but goal by goal, you must have a plan to make sure the employees and company are successful and safer as a result. A major part of successful safety goals are employees who are on the same page as far as the objectives go, but also that they regularly report safety hazards in the workplace.
Sidenote: It’s important to point out that your goals must be realistic and achievable with your current team and resources. We fully encourage setting ambitious safety goals, however, they must be feasible and will not impact operations or employee wellness in negative ways during those 12 months.
Build a solid health safety policy (occupational health and safety policy)
A well-developed and researched worker health and safety policy is essential for the success of any safety goals or objectives. A health and safety policy, which can have a focus on lone worker policy, is essentially a commitment from the employer to do everything and anything within their resources to protect the overall team of employees. It is a promise to maintain a safe and healthy workplace while explaining/documenting how they will keep the workplace as safety risk-free as possible.
Also known as an occupational health and safety (OHS) policy, this document or plan will help employers develop safety protocols and policies to protect their people according to local OHS laws and legislation.
The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety says the policy must:
“involve senior management and representatives in the preparation of the policy,
be seen as consistent with the workplace's objectives of operating in an efficient and predictable manner,
be relevant and appropriate to nature, scale, and OHS hazards and risk associated with that workplaces’ needs (not adopted from another workplace), and
be accepted as equal in importance to the workplace's other policy objectives.”
Safety policies are typically divided into sections such as contacts, procedures, protocols, as well as an emergency response plan which can be incredibly effective in dangerous situations and circumstances.
How do you measure success?
If your list of safety goals is long and comprehensive, it can be overwhelming at the beginning of the year when setting and planning them so that they do not affect operations and employee wellness. Part of the plan includes how you will measure success in achieving these goals – the metrics that will tell the employer and management if the goal was reached as well as if health and safety were improved.
Safety metrics include:
Number of close calls/injuries/fatalities
Specific types of injuries
Number and types of injuries when performing specific tasks/in specific locations
Number of safety training sessions/workshops
Number of hazard assessments performed
Staff wellness and safety surveys
Number of sick days taken by staff
Already have safety goals?
“Celebrating achievements is a great way to tell people how much you appreciate their contributions. And, recognizing employees who go above and beyond encourages them to repeat those actions in the future.”
Do you already know all of this and have safety goals developed for 2022? That’s great, however, you might want to revisit them. In an ASSP article Goal Setting to Improve Organizational Performance, safety professional David Finley also strongly highlights the “realistic” element, and he recommends asking these questions when re-looking at your safety goals:
“What do we want to accomplish?
Why do we want to do it?
How are we going to do it?
How will we measure progress and success?”
He also recommends building a diverse safety goal committee with people from all departments, as well as communicating goals updates and achievements to the team. “Celebrating achievements is a great way to tell people how much you appreciate their contributions. And, recognizing employees who go above and beyond encourages them to repeat those actions in the future.”
Measuring health and safety performance
When measuring your health and safety performance, it is obviously important to look at the quantitative metrics – like the ones mentioned earlier – but also qualitative data about work and safety culture. This can be gained through interactive and engaging training sessions, workshops as well as feedback from 1-on-1s and meetings between management and employees.
Occupational safety measurement terminology you need to know!
When setting and then measuring safety goals for 2022, it is helpful and arguably more efficient to understand key occupational safety measurement language for your safety goals and safety policy.
What are Goals?
These terms are in alphabetical order but the most safety measurement term happens to come first. Goals, within occupational safety, are the desired results from new safety protocols and strategies (see below). Goals, if possible, are stated succinctly in one or two explanatory sentences.
Hazards:
The CCOHS defines hazard as, “any source of potential damage, harm or adverse health effects on something or someone. Basically, a hazard is a potential for harm or an adverse effect (for example, to people as health effects, to organizations as property or equipment losses, or to the environment).” It is not to be confused with safety risk.
Metric:
A metric is a quantitative data set that you can measure and compare to improve the safety of employees and the organization, including its operations.
Safety leading indicator:
Safety leading indicators, according to the Campbell River Institute, are: “Proactive, preventative, and predictive measures that monitor and provide current information about the effective performance, activities, and processes of an EHS management system that can drive the identification and elimination or control of risks in the workplace that can cause incidents and injuries.”
They are basically safety measures and steps that can be taken before an accident happens, sometimes preventing them entirely, if not mitigating their impact and damage.
Safety management system/safety program:
A safety management system or safety program is a structured and highly detailed approach to implementing safety protocols and changes within an organization (both big and small). It is a way for the employer to deliver safety protocols effectively and efficiently.
Safety risk:
Unlike a hazard, which is an actual, current source of damage and danger, a safety risk is the possibility of an injury and damage to equipment and the environment where it occurred. The likelihood of hazard hurting an employee is measured by how much safety risk it has.
Strategies:
How will you tackle these goals and make sure you are successful in improving the safety of your employees? Last but not least, it is through well-planned and -implemented strategies that are determined by the employees they are protecting as well as what the primary objectives are. Safety-improving strategies include a growing range of technologies and platforms such as busy social media channels, wearable technologies, and even artificial intelligence (AI).
However, these strategies can also be incredibly simple like engaging training sessions and workshops, a staff-wide quiz/contest, or new “walk with caution” signs for high-risk areas. The safety goal statement is like “talking the talk,” but your detailed strategies are like “walking the walk.”
Occupational safety is a process
So whether you’re just starting to develop your safety goals for the year or if you’re revisiting them to make some needed adjustments, as an employer and employee, you need to be constantly looking for new ways, new goals to improve the safety and security of those working for the company. Occupational safety may have milestones, and it is ongoing and changing according to new safety hazards and industry evolution. When a company embraces that evolution makes safety a priority, its employees will feel more valued and cared for as a result. Who wouldn’t want that?