Safety Culture: Measuring Safety

The ability to measure your safety program is important to your workplace’s success. Without measuring safety, you won’t be able to determine if your safety program is effective. Here are four steps to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your safety program.

1. Create a mission and a vision statement for your workplace. These help you set specific safety goals. As your employees work toward the goals, they will help boost their engagement. Your next step will be setting specific goals. It is important to establish what your safety priorities are. Defining your priorities will help you set your goals. Seek input from your management staff when creating both the mission and the vision.

2. Work with your entire team to create specific safety goals. SMART Goals is a methodology that can be used to help create these goals. The acronym stands for what each goal should be:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time bound

SMART goals are meant to address all your major job responsibilities and creating them will help you achieve your safety priorities.

3. Begin tracking the key safety indicators related to achieving your SMART goals. Below are the most commonly measured safety indicators:

Lagging indicators:

Review your past injuries to identify trends.
Compare your injury trends to those that relate to your industry and if they are not related, you may have an uncontrolled hazard that is unique to your workplace.
Compare your recordable injury rates for the last five years to those found for your industry on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. If you are higher than the nationwide averages, you may have a lot of room to grow safety-wise.

Leading indicators:

If you aren’t already doing so, start conducting investigations on all near misses to identify additional trends.
Review your past inspections to identify hazard trends.
Conduct worksite audits to identify potential breakdowns in your safety systems.

4. Use the data you have generated to create action plans to correct breakdowns in your safety and production systems.

IMPORTANT

Measuring safety is just one part of your safety culture. Read more about the definition of safety culture as well as good communication and hazard identification at your business.

What to read next about measuring safety

Workplace safety in California starts with the Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP). To be successful, you want everyone—from your employees all the way up to top management—to be onboard with the plan and to follow it. For information, see the 10 Reasons Why Workplace Safety is Important.

Here are resources to help you develop your company’s mission and vision.

If you need assistance in developing SMART goals for your organization, this step-by-step approach can help you get started.

See How to Write an Action Plan to Help You Achieve Your Goals for more information on developing an action plan to help achieve workplace safety and other business goals.

If you’re in the agriculture industry, this checklist reminds your tractor-driving employees of the steps they should take to operate the equipment safely.

When an employee is injured on the job, one of the things you want to find out is what happened. You want to do the same after a near-miss incident. See Accident/Near Miss Incident Checklist for help with your investigations.

Are you getting the message across in your safety training? Evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of your training allows you to determine what’s working and what’s not.

One of the most important things to remember about measuring safety culture is that you’re never done. Having a good safety culture isn’t a one-time effort; it’s a continuous process. Share the results with your management and staff; review what did and didn’t work. Investigate and evaluate together the areas of potential growth, and revise your company’s approach for continuous improvement.

Safety Culture: Measuring Safety

Additional Resources

IMPORTANT

What to read next about measuring safety

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