Publication: Safety at Work
Issue: April/May/June 2015
There seemingly would be many indicators that a safety program is working well or healthy, right? Unfortunately, this is not always the case. In many instances, safety performance is narrowed down to a basic indicator – a ‘check engine’ equivalent – known as the injury rate. The problem with metrics is that they are only “proxies” (i.e. substitutions) of the overall health of your safety processes, and yet they take on a life of their own. Instead of focusing on managing the safety system based on performance, the focus centers on the metric instead. Injury rate tells us where we do not want to be, but does not necessarily give us direction on how to improve. There are better indicators available to us than just the injury rate. View the full article here.