Abstract
Lord Kelvin famously stated "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science". So it is with safety performance.
Measuring the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate or the Total Recordable Injury Rate alone tells us nothing useful about an organisation's safety performance. Severity indices provide little more than an indication of how lucky the victims were. Yet still, these are the metrics most often touted as indicators of an organisation's safety successes or failures.
Reality is much more complex. Lagging indicators such as the above offer no insight into where efforts need to be focused within the organisation to achieve safety improvements. They tell us nothing about which part of the operation needs attention and from where lessons can be learned. They present a homogenised snapshot of historical data with no opportunity to drill deeper into how or why the company performed as it did. Even in the most structured organisations, they are fraught with irregularities and uncertainties.
This paper examines an HSE Performance Management system which was designed to bring together all available information and to present it to managers in such a way that weaknesses in the organisation could be identified quickly and the effects of remedial initiatives clearly demonstrated.
