Is your safety program working? How do you know? Tracking injuries, illnesses, and workers’ compensation claims is a good start, but there are other indicators that can give you a broader, deeper, clearer picture of how your safety program is functioning.
Most safety program metrics begin with required injury and illness recordkeeping, and with workers’ compensation claims and x-mods. These can certainly give you a picture of the effectiveness of your program, but if you expand your metrics to include some additional indicators, you’ll give yourself more information that you can use to determine whether your program is improving or deteriorating, where you need to improve, what your safety priorities should be, and whether your interventions are working.
Today we’ll look at one critical indicator of safety that you might be missing from your metrics—safety communications.
Communicating Safety
Communication is a critical ingredient in your safety program. How are you doing at communicating safety to your workers? How are they doing at communicating about safety to you? And is there a way to count safety communications?
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Here are some suggestions for measuring, evaluating, and improving safety communications:
- How many safety-related suggestions are workers putting into your suggestion box? If the number is low, think about why. Is your workplace so safe, and management so proactive, that suggestions aren’t often necessary? Maybe, but it may also be that:
- Workers are not aware that they can make suggestions. If this is the problem, make an effort to get the word out.
- Workers lack the necessary materials to make suggestions. Are paper and writing instruments available near your suggestion box? If not, perhaps workers feel that you don’t really want their suggestions after all.
- Workers feel that their suggestions are not taken seriously. If you have a suggestion box, you need to respond to the suggestions or workers will soon decide that their input is not really valued. You may not be able to implement every suggestion, but try to provide feedback to workers that indicates their suggestions are read, considered, and promptly addressed —even if they are not addressed in the specific manner workers suggest.
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- How many safety-related reports do you receive? Do workers tell you about near misses, potential problems, situations where they felt uncomfortable, or any other incident that falls short of a recordable injury that might have an impact on their health and safety? If you’re not hearing anything, even complaints, you may not have your finger on the pulse of safety in your workplace. Try to encourage workers to talk to you about any concerns they might have.
- How many different methods are you using to communicate safety to your workers? Signage and training are common methods, but what other avenues are you using to communicate safety to your employees? Are you using written materials? In multiple languages? With pictorial illustrations? Impromptu chats with workers? By management, not just you? Guest speakers? What methods could you add to your repertoire?
Tomorrow, we’ll look at three more indicators you can use to track the success of your safety program: safety committee activities, training records, and near-miss investigations.