42% of workers feel they don’t have proper safety training. If you polled your workers, what would their answer be? Would they even give you an honest answer?
Measuring the effectiveness of your safety program is a challenge in more ways than one. There are a few ways we can go about measuring effectiveness, but there are challenges if these practices aren’t already in place. As a starting point, I’d ask you to consider:
- Are management and staff on the same page?
- How much stock do you place in the “Number of Days Without an Accident?”
- How do you tell the difference between a symptom and the disease?
The best place to get an idea of where your blind spots are is to ask your own workers. This can be a challenge for a number of reasons:
- What questions are you going to ask?
- Who is going to ask them?
- Will you get honest answers if there isn’t trust or if employees think there may be potential retaliation?
What I often find is that there is a gap between where management thinks the safety program is and where the workers think it is. By using a third party conducting confidential Q&A’s with your employees, you’ll find the results more honest, reliable, and actionable.
I’ve been to a lot of facilities, and I’ve seen my share of “It’s Been ______ Days Since Our Last Accident” signs. This still has a place and can be a point of pride, but I’d challenge you if you rely on it to measure the effectiveness of your safety program.
This metric is an output, but the variables that go into determining how this number turns out are legion. Consider that most incidents don’t turn into actual injuries. Injuries themselves are relatively rare events and while I believe in creating your own luck, luck is absolutely a factor here.
Remember that Luck can tip the scales in good and bad ways – good luck might mean far fewer injuries while bad luck may mean having more accidents and injuries than would normally be expected.
The success of your business – and the lives of your employees – shouldn’t rely on luck. While you can’t prevent all injuries, you can tip the scales in favor of prevention through identifying and tracking the right KPIs.
Once you’ve started down this path, make sure you’re differentiating between the symptoms and the disease. Here’s an example – when there are frequent cuts or lacerations, you might decide to upgrade your PPE. This is certainly reasonable; however, if you dig deeper, you might find a lack of training in machine guarding is at the root of the problem. Better PPE might prevent smaller cuts, but they might not prevent finger amputations.
Root Cause can be identified through several methods, including regular safety audits, confidential Q&A’s, and job hazard analysis.
One of the keys to accident prevention is knowing the effectiveness of your safety program. With the number of moving pieces, it can be hard to understand how everything ties together. In the short term, it can be more costly to put your time and money towards a longer-term fix; however, band aids only stop the bleeding – they won’t fix the reason you needed the band aid in the first place.