When designing and monitoring an internal business safety plan, the easy part can be the beginning. Identifying issues, setting up goals, and defining your hopes for your safety program mean nothing if you don’t follow through. That is the difficult part.
How do you ensure that the tasks, actions, and systems get implemented in order to help you attain your organisation’s optimum safety?
Safety completion rates are a vital tool and metric to help you monitor your program’s progress and measure safety success. This article will explain what they are, how to track them, and more.
What Is A Safety Completion Rate?
A safety completion rate refers to the number of “actions” carried out to completion in your safety program. These are closed-up activities that contribute to or are highlighted as requirements of your safety processes.
As important as it is to report incidents and conduct audits, it is also important to focus on root causes, corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), and, finally, close-outs on the reports.
Enter completion rates: Completion rates are focused on what gets done based on the number of safety signals, risks, and initiatives.
Examples of “actions” that can be monitored for completion in your safety program include:
- Addressing safety risk factors
- Resolving the cause of reports
- Closing reports with clear recommendations
- Introducing preventative actions
Completion rates are important for identifying if your safety plan translates from policy and theoretical goals to practice. They help you sustain accountability and illustrate to your workers and other actors the impact of your program.
They’re also essential for measuring where your plan meets difficulties. What goals do you struggle to meet? By helping you interrogate these questions, completion rates allow you to move towards introducing systems that support your aims.
How To Track Safety Completion Rates
To calculate your completion rate, you need to divide the number of completed actions or tasks by the total number of actions in your safety programs. This includes the results of audits, inspections, and resolved incident reports with CAPA.
Tracking completion rates requires monitoring other metrics and safety key performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis. By watching these, you get an idea of the progress you’re making on your safety aims. Regular data tracking also enables you to note when there is no progress on an issue and when you are not quite meeting your desired endpoint.
With completion rates, we are moving towards more comprehensive and detailed KPIs. It is, however, important not to forget other important metrics such as leading and lagging indicators in safety management.
Safety completion rates are only one part of your greater analytics and insights. To use them effectively, you need to view them in this way and observe them in conjunction with other numbers.
Using a centralised safety management platform can make tracking the data easier. One of the primary reasons why organisations and management neglect data tracking is that they find the numbers overwhelming. A dedicated safety platform makes the work of monitoring analytics, KPIs, and other important numbers so much easier.
The Challenge Of Using Safety Completion Rates
Completion rates may help you gauge the success of your safety efforts, however, they have their challenges.
One, that we have already touched on above, is its singular view. Your completion rate cannot work in isolation. It cannot be your primary metric for measuring success. For it to be effective, it has to be a part of a larger analytics plan featuring other metrics.
Another downside to completion rates is that you can’t rely on them to be the full picture of what has been done. A task can easily be marked as completed without any actions taken. This makes it appear as though everything is on track even when it isn’t, which can harm your safety mandate.
It is therefore important to use them as a part of the metrics and KPIs in safety management, but not as a key component.
Completion rates also aren’t very useful for a new, budding safety program. At the beginning of a new system, you’re not trying to evaluate the success of endings. You should be more focused on measuring your progress and the reception of your program by staff and management.
How To Increase Safety Completion Rates
The best way to boost your safety completion rates and ensure you get all necessary actions done is to get your team invested. Your workers and supervisors are the people that work actively in your environment. They know best what the safety conditions are and how to best improve them. They are also integral in implementing and sustaining safety policies on a daily basis.
To improve the rate at which they complete allocated safety tasks and address issues, you need to show them the importance of workplace safety. You have to nurture a culture that values and prioritises safety.
You can do this by:
- Holding safety workshops and training to educate them about their role in your workplace safety.
- Having regular check-ins and meetings to gauge their progress and sentiments on the policy.
- Conduct individual and anonymous surveys that allow them to express concerns and contribute freely.
- Provide safety checklists for them to keep track of tasks that they need to remain responsible for.
- Sharing information on the progress of the program to keep everybody informed.
- Illustrating the success of the program as it develops to build investment and show its impact.
- Allocate tasks to specific staff members, building responsibility and autonomy and promoting accountability.
Final Thoughts
Workplace safety is an essential part of employee satisfaction, retention, and more. However, it can be difficult to measure how successful your safety efforts are. Analytics and data provide insight into your proximity to your goals, your policy progress, etc.
Completion rates are a necessary part of this work. They tell you if you are actually getting things done and which tasks you need to monitor more effectively to ensure completion. Use them to drive and ground your program as a part of a holistic safety data tracking effort.
If you're looking for a platform to collect more data to have better completion rates in safety, we've got you covered. Falcony is easy-to-use, boosts two-way communication, has customisable workflows, automated analytics, vast integration possibilities and more. Start your 30-day trial or contact us for more information.
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.
