What governs your safety strategy? Often, organizations develop their safety strategies in response to their incident rates, or to the need to comply with regulations and standards. If those issues tend to drive your safety strategy, then you need not feel alone.
Most approaches to safety management are more reactionary than proactive, more regulation driven than strategic. This is true because that is how safety has been managed in the past, more reactive than strategy focused. Have these approaches been effective? You be the judge.
Let us talk about measuring safety performance. Typically, safety is measured be the safety statistics, incidence rates, severity rates and costs. These measures are lagging indicators and represent injuries and illnesses.
I had a corporate safety manager call me looking for one number he could use that adequately represented the safety performance of the organization. Apparently, the CEO wanted one number to look at. I told him that the one number approach did not make sense. Here is why. Let us say you were getting into an airplane and you looked into the cockpit and saw only one instrument on the instrument panel for the pilot to look at while flying the plane. Would you feel confident?
What one display would you want the pilot to use? Altimeter? Speed? Hydraulic pressure? Landing gear? This does not make sense does it? The pilot needs numerous indicators that show the plane's flying status.
You would not trust a pilot with only one indicator of performance, so why would you trust the safety of your organization to only one indicator of performance? It does not make sense to look at one number, like incidence rates, to show the organization's safety management status?
It is important that one realize two crucial fallacies of using only downstream numbers to measure safety performance.
The numbers do not tell why incidents are occurring
The numbers fail to tell what should be done to prevent incidents
There are other reasons why the traditional safety numbers should be used with caution.
The numbers do not provide an understanding of the organization's safety systems and processes, which drive safety performance
Injury and illness statistics do not demonstrate the value or priority an organization places on its safety and health systems
An increased emphasis on numbers makes them less valid, because people learn to make the numbers look good.
Measuring safety performance using the statistics is like trying to coach a football game by watching the scoreboard. Instead, you must closely observe the players on the field and how the game is being played. In other words, you must know what is going on upstream in the organization in order to make strategic decisions that affect the outcome.