Safety is an essential part of workplace functionality and employee wellbeing. Setting safety involvement Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is an important part of developing viable and effective safety strategies.
KPIs help you identify and track the progress of your safety measures. You can gauge how far you’ve come in reaching your safety goals.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why safety matters in every industry. We’ll also look at the main aims of safety, and how you can develop an involved safety culture with KPIs.
Why Is Safety Important For Every Organisation?
Workplace safety is connected to various aspects of every business’ operations. It impacts employees’ well-being including mental, physical, and emotional health. Having safety systems in place also allows you to protect external actors like guests, customers, partners, third-party service providers, and more.
While there are certain high-risk fields, all industries and businesses have risks and unsafe conditions. Preparing for them and designing spaces that encompass them allows you to mitigate these risks.
This includes having structures that prepare you to deal with conditions like fires, chemical issues, and more. These are some of the more dangerous situations to consider. Others include things like mental crises and employee burnout, which can be big problems, too.
All these factors affect a range of industries so all businesses should take them into account. Having them under your control ensures that you can deal with them when they arise. This preparedness for safety challenges makes it possible to save on insurance, avoid legal action, sustain good workplace relationships, and more.
The Main Goals Of Safety
Safety aims to create a workplace environment that caters to the needs of all actors. When businesses create programs for health and safety, the goal is to prevent and reduce fatalities, harm, injuries, and ailments.
You want to maximise the ease of use and the accessibility of the workplace environment. The underlying aim in doing so is designing your space in a way that improves the way your team works and experiences their workplace. This means identifying any safety concerns and mitigating them, thereby creating a safe work environment.
How To Create An Involvement Culture Around Safety
The key to making safety a present and consistent part of your workplace culture is transparency. Your employees need to feel the willingness of management to participate and remain open in safety.
Despite many safety systems excluding employees, the best way to create an involved safety culture is to build trust in all workers. Employees want to feel seen and heard. This will help them ease into contributing and speaking openly about any safety issues they have.
You can cultivate transparency and an involved safety culture by:
- Including employee education in your health and safety plan. This includes workshops, training, guides, courses, and more.
- Showing your team what to do and what not to do when an incident occurs. Steady and exemplary management shows your staff that you take safety seriously.
- Turning safety into a daily and regular part of how your organisation does things. Consistency matters. This makes safety a top-of-mind part of your staff’s workday instead of a random occurrence that they don’t need to worry about.
Essential Safety Involvement KPIs
You have an almost endless variety of KPIs that you can choose from for your health and safety program. When deciding on indicators, you can really tailor them to what you need for your business.
You have to consider the good and bad aspects of your existing program. You must also consider what you would like your program to do (i.e. your goals).
There are, however, a few basic ones that you should definitely consider including. Let’s take a look at them.
Audits & Inspections
Most industries require businesses to run inspections and audits for compliance. They give you an opportunity to critically explore the flaws of your program. Thus, you should track the following metrics:
- Inspection and audit frequency
- Inspection results
- Compliance with your safety plan
- Regularity of negative issues
Education & Training
Informing your staff about how to go about responding to incidents, reporting, and other procedures is a necessity. Education helps improve your employees’ perspective of safety and makes them active participants in safety. There are various benefits of creating intensive safety programs.
These are some of the training indicators that you can track:
- Rate of completion
- Type of training
- Training frequency
- Post-training effects
- Additional training
- Passes and failures
Near Misses
Situations in which incidents almost happen may not seem important but they matter. They help identify conditions that could cause harm in the future.
You should approach them as you would other, “more serious” incidents. Follow the effects, provide feedback, and address the unsafe circumstance.
You should also consider the costs that the near misses can bring up. Although they don't lead to people getting harmed, they may have costs on equipment, space, etc.
Prevention, Safety Observations, & Corrective Tasks
Near misses are great for identifying dangerous or unsafe situations but safety observations can act as prevention or correction. Observations come a step before near misses. Your team spots unsafe behaviour and conditions before anything happens and reports them.
Encouraging regular and continuous observation reporting is preventative. Taking note of these reports allows you to address issues and develop policies and processes that tackle them.
KPIs to consider include:
- Safety observation types
- Observation or reporting frequency
- Observation resolutions
- Positive vs negative observations
How To Set Up KPIs And Implement Them
The best way to establish KPIs is to decide on your safety program goals first. What do you want to improve? Or what would you like to change? Understanding this helps you pinpoint what you should keep an eye on.
Use your existing program to identify current safety flaws and to see what works. You can then set up goals and correlate KPIs that tackle the flaws and enhance the parts that are already effective.
Final Thoughts
Safety programs are not a cost and should not be an afterthought. They are a necessity. KPIs aid you in better managing your program and reaching your internal safety goals. If you make conscious and careful choices on your indicators, you can increase the success of your program, monitor its effectiveness, and more.
If your organisation is looking for a 360° safety management tool to involve all employees, service providers and external stakeholders to improve the quality of your operations, have a look at the 30-day free trial of the Falcony Platform:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
