Making continuous improvements to the health and safety of your company is a fundamental part of boosting both sustainability and profitability. In fact, it’s key to enhancing performance and reducing operational risks. But in order to embed a culture of constant development, it is vital to figure out where you currently stand.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) play an important role in this process, helping to define your safety goals and identify potential improvements. By allowing you to make comparisons and assessing the measures you already have in place, you can find weaknesses in your company’s existing occupational safety processes and communicate successes effectively.
In this article, we outline the most commonly used KPIs and discuss the aspects you should consider when selecting relevant metrics for your company.
reactive or proactive indicators?
In the field of health and safety, key performance indicators can be divided into two categories: reactive (or lagging) indicators and proactive (or leading) indicators. Just as you need to select suitable priorities for your occupational safety activities, you’ll need to find a healthy balance of both leading and lagging indicators when selecting KPIs.
Lagging indicators help establish your current level of occupational safety and facilitate comparisons with other companies. They are based on retrospective data about safety incidents and outcomes that cannot be reversed.
Leading indicators, however, provide a future outlook. Sometimes known as “preventive indicators”, they do not focus on past events but instead concentrate on measures that can be implemented or existing conditions that can be amended in an effort to prevent future safety incidents.
“Just looking at lagging data by accident rates doesn’t move us forward,” explained Andrew Sharman, in an interview for the Safety Management Trend Report 2021. “That’s the big issue here. So, it’s time to change the way we think, and instead of looking in the rear-view mirror, we need to look forward to where we want to go, rather than trying to get away from where we were.”
how to select the right KPIs?
When it comes to selecting lagging and leading indicators, there is no catch-all solution that works for every company. Instead, look at your company’s situation, the problems you face, and the goals you have set. As ever, it is important to ensure comparability, continuity and transparency. To achieve this – and for your indicators to actually provide meaningful insights – it is essential that the goals you set fulfill the SMART criteria:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attractive/agreed
- Realistic
- Timely
Also, be sure to consider your current safety culture. A large proportion of safety performance indicators are based on employee reports; this means you need to clearly inform your workforce about the purpose and use of indicators so that employees embrace them in their daily work. It is also vital to have a simple, understandable system that makes it possible to submit reports and track events. You should therefore only use indicators you are sure you have enough meaningful data to support.
Consider the following three points when selecting your indicator set:
- Combine lagging and leading indicators
- KPIs need to give meaningful insight into your goals and problems
- Only track KPIs you have enough meaningful data to support
what are the most commonly used safety KPIs?
As part of our Safety Management Trend Report, we investigated which KPIs are most commonly employed by companies Europe-wide. The results of the survey of 629 safety specialists from across Europe are as follows:
detailed look at the five areas and ways to determine indicators:
1. reported incidents: accident rate
All workplace accidents must be documented in the first-aid log. As a result, companies should already gather data regarding accident severity and frequency. When considered in relation to the employee headcount or hours worked, this data allows you to draw conclusions about the quality of your occupational safety system. The relationship is illustrated by the accident rate, which is calculated in different ways around the world.
The lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) is broadly accepted as an international standard.
- LTIFR: Lost-time injuries / hours worked x 2,000 (instead of using a factor of 2,000, you could also use 1,000 or 1,000,000 depending on the size of your company)
In some European countries, other commonly used accident rates focus on reportable accidents according to local regulations. In Germany, for instance, the LTIFR is supplemented by two additional formulas: accidents per thousand employees and the occupational accident rate.
- Accidents per thousand employees: (reportable accidents ÷ headcount) x 1,000
- Occupational accident rate: (reportable accidents ÷ hours worked) x 1,000
2. accident-free days
Like the accident rate, the number of accident-free days is another reactive KPI. It measures the number of days in which no workplace accidents have occurred. As the Safety Management Trend Report shows, tracking this indicator and celebrating successes is common practice.
Nevertheless, you should approach this KPI with caution, as it can create false incentives. The fact that this figure is low may mean employees have simply chosen not to report accidents in a (misguided) effort to contribute to safety in the workplace.
Commenting in the Safety Management Trend Report 2021, Gerd-Jan Frijters, explained: “What you see are the LED boards with “200 days since the last injury” or “350 days since the last accident”. When there is an accident, the board will be reset to zero and it’s not very motivating for people.”
3. near misses
These are incidents in which nobody has been injured – but which could have resulted in injuries if circumstances had been slightly different.
Once again, focusing simply on achieving “zero” near misses is not advisable. Instead of indicating a dangerous workplace, a high number of near misses may in fact indicate an open, high-functioning culture of failure in which employees freely and openly report near misses.
As a safety manager, you rely on employees reporting near misses – as only then can you identify risks and take appropriate action. If employees fail to report a near miss, a repeat occurrence could result in a genuine accident. This is backed up by Heinrich’s accident triangle, which states that 300 unsafe situations will result in 29 accidents with minor injuries and 1 serious accident or fatality.
Instead of reducing the number of near misses, a more sensible approach would be to look at the ratio of near misses to accidents. How closely does it correspond to the accident triangle? If employees and managers are not recording incidents and near misses, it might be sensible to aim to achieve a ratio of reported near misses to accidents as outlined in the accident triangle. The rise in this figure is a good indicator of improvements to your safety culture.
4. audit and inspection results
A good structure and classification system ensures that all phases of internal and external audits generate KPIs that can support process improvement work, from planning and implementing measures to identifying and eradicating instances of non-conformance. Examples of these KPIs include:
- Ratio of conducted audits to planned audits: This target-actual comparison shows how effectively audits are implemented in relation to your company’s goal attainment. An audit is deemed effective when the target ratio is reliably achieved within desired tolerances.
- Ratio of non-conformities to corrective measures: This KPI provides insight into the quality of a company’s culture of failure. If non-conformities do not result in corrective measures, the same non-conformities may reoccur.
- Ratio of recommendations to preventive measures: This KPI illustrates how your company handles audit recommendations. If recommendations are not implemented or documented, this can result in future non-conformities. Your CIP (continuous improvement process) can also help to encourage a focus on preventive measures.
- Number of overdue deadlines for implementing measures (relative or absolute): Audits usually produce recommendations or identify non-conformities. All non-conformities should be resolved before the follow-up inspection or the next audit. Overdue deadlines can shed light on your safety culture.
- Number of anomalies in certification/customer audits with regard to audit management: Taken in isolation, the number of anomalies does not give any indication of how a management system works. Instead, you can only draw conclusions about how your company has developed in recent years by comparing data retrospectively.
Good to Know
The CAPA (corrective action and preventive action) system investigates discrepancies, non-conformities and errors, implements corrective actions and then takes preventive actions. Unlike other quality management standards such as ISO 9001, CAPA based ISO 13485 is a continuous improvement process. It aims to eliminate instances of non-conformity with requirements set down in applicable regulations and technical standards.
5. behavior-based safety (BBS) indicators
Behavior-based safety is an active rather than reactive approach to implementing a modern occupational health and safety process. The Safety Management Trend Report shows that a growing number of companies are incorporating this approach as they seek to promote safer behavior and, ultimately, a safer workplace overall.
BBS relies on integrating employees and constantly observing safe behavior, either in a system where everyone “observes” each other, or by encouraging individual employees to report their observations. This approach examines safety behaviors and can produce constructive feedback, however, BBS usually generates large volumes of data. This is a treasure trove for KPIs and analyses, but also a good reason to examine which data you actually need to track and analyze on a regular basis.
The following KPIs can be used to analyze BBS programs:
- the number of observations relative to the total of all possible observations
- the number of observations of safe behavior relative to the total number of observations
- the number of responses to observations relative to the total of all possible observations, or the number of measures implemented by managers
- the number of employees who have received training on BBS
- the number of safety-related behaviors that have been defined
Given the vast quantities of data that BBS programs can generate, cloud-based software solutions offer a major advantage. Systems such as the AMCS EHS Management platform allow you to store unlimited amounts of data and also structure this information. A dashboard also makes key insights accessible in the form of KPIs and thereby also highlights the success of your safety system.
Finally, you will need to convince employees of the benefits of your KPIs and gain their approval, otherwise the data will have to be anonymized. In any case, you must ensure that data processing is transparent and ensure data security.
are you ready for proactive safety?
With an increasing focus on sustainability and an emphasis on continuous improvement in the areas of occupational safety, environmental and quality management, there is now a clear trend towards proactive safety. That’s because forward-thinking approaches such as behavior-based safety allow you to act pre-emptively rather than reacting once problems have occurred, which is a sizable advantage.
Although it’s important to ensure that you can compare and contrast your chosen KPIs as easily as possible, the ability to place traditional and modern KPIs side-by-side helps to assess the impact of theory on practice. As such, it can reveal which measures are really helping to make the work environment at your company safer, more effective and more sustainable long-term.
We invite you to learn more about AMCS EHS Management – contact us now. You can also see for yourself how it streamlines your EHS tasks. Request a free demo now.