Introduction
The Health and Safety Index partnered with a range of like-minded professionals globally to create a successful submission for the recent International Congress of Occupational Health (ICOH) 2024 in Marrakesh, Morocco. One of our channel partner’s Maria Titopoulou led this work and presented learning to an international audience.
In the continuously changing landscape of workplace safety, a forward-thinking approach is essential to accurately measure and enhance health and safety performance.
A group of International Health and Safety Specialists have collaborated to develop a modern approach that emphasizes resilience and relevance in performance metrics. This method includes three crucial steps:
- Evaluate Inputs
- Confirm Strategy & Metrics
- Measure & Monitor
Adopting a simple 3-step approach to measuring health and safety performance will enable success as going beyond measuring incident occurrences and other quantitative measures will assist with driving a resilient and improved safety performance.
Methodology
Step 1. Evaluating Inputs
The first step is to assess factors that will influence the strategy. This step is crucial as it lays the groundwork for developing sustainable strategic choices.
By understanding the organizational context, potential hazards, workforce demographics, and regulatory requirements, companies can tailor their strategies to address specific needs and challenges effectively.
Evaluating inputs also includes engaging with stakeholders to gather insights and identify areas for improvement. This holistic assessment ensures that the strategy is not only compliant with legal standards but also aligned with the company’s culture and operational realities.
Step 2. Confirming Strategy & Metrics
The second step is to identify your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned with your maturity level.
- OKR’s: Focus on verifiable options aligned with strategy.
- KPI’s: Evaluating evidence and opinion-based options.
OKRs help in setting ambitious goals that drive progress, while KPIs provide measurable indicators of success. It’s vital to select metrics that reflect both leading and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators, such as training completion rates and near-miss reporting, provide foresight into potential issues. They can be viewed as measures of the positive steps that organizations take that may prevent an OHS incident from occurring1 2.
Lagging indicators, like incident rates and lost-time injuries, are measures of OHS outcomes or outputs and provide a measure of past performance. 3
Aligning these metrics with the organization’s maturity level ensures that the goals are realistic and achievable. A company in the early stages of developing its safety culture might focus on foundational metrics, whereas a more mature organization might aim for advanced metrics like behavioral safety observations and safety climate surveys.
Step 3: Measuring and Monitoring
The third step is to select metrics balanced with organizational maturity levels and start measurement.
This process involves balancing the chosen metrics with the organization’s maturity level and initiating measurement protocols.
After the rapid growth in the amount of data produced during the last ten years, organizations are heavily invested in finding ways on how to develop their decision processes into more data-driven. An effective and a widely known concept for answering this demand is the so-called maturity measurement. Maturity models provide a method for organizations to find out their current-state of data-driven decision making compared to market standards, and at the same time, a way to identify the most important development steps on their path forward.4
Consistent monitoring enables organizations to track progress, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. To be data-driven, an organization must have the right processes and the right culture in place to augment or drive critical business decisions with these analyses and therefore have a direct impact on the business. Culture, then, is the key. 5
One risk is to become overly focused on data, rather than focusing on learning through narrative and effective conversations. This is consistent with evaluating OKR’s or operational critical controls through storytelling, rather than numbers – refer to pic 3.2.
Additionally, transparent reporting and communication of these metrics across all levels of the organization foster a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
Discussion
The Health and Safety Index is an online assessment enabling organisations to measure, focus, and act on improvements in health and safety.
1. Holistic: Unlike traditional safety culture surveys, the Health and Safety Index covers 4 aspects that help inform strategic choices.
2. Simple: Easy to read questions. The Health and Safety Index can be completed in approx. 10 mins!
3. Tailored: Our solution allows for business specific demographic data to help identify hotspots and comparisons between cohorts, e.g. positions, locations and business units. This informs strategic choices, a targeted use of resources and a positive Return on Investment (ROI).
4. Predictive Analytics: Our self-managed interactive portal analyzes your survey data in real-time, providing you with actionable insights and forecasts.
5. Valid & Reliable: An independent empirical study by a Murdoch University PhD (Org Psych) concluded the reliability of the Health and Safety Index was “Excellent” (r >0.9). This allows organisations to apply the Health and Safety Index and benchmark performance with high levels of confidence.
6. Engagement: The Health and Safety Index has an integrated set of employee engagement questions. Employee engagement is commonly used as a lead to improve organisational culture, people and performance.
Results
BSA Ltd is about to complete the Health and Safety Index for the fourth year in a row, to help inform their HSE strategy for 2024-25. Results also inform ASX shareholders and are published at Annual General Meetings and Annual Reports.
Conclusion
Creating a balance scorecard to measure health and safety performance to align with your strategy is crucial, e.g.
Proactive Compliance Metrics
- Notifiable Work
- Licenses
Reactive Compliance Metrics
- Notifiable Incidents
- High Potential Loss of Primary Containment
Proactive Care Metrics
- Strategic OKR effectiveness
- Operational discipline effectiveness
- Critical control effectiveness
- Health & Safety Index leadership, engagement, health & wellbeing.
This modern approach to measuring health and safety performance provides a comprehensive and proactive way to ensure safety in the workplace. It goes beyond traditional methods and offers a more holistic view of safety performance. By focusing on both proactive and reactive measures, organizations can better manage risks and improve overall safety performance.
Got questions? Want to speak to a member of the HSI team? Contact us today, we’d love to hear from you.
Click here to download a sample report.
References:
- Shea et al, T. (2016). Leading indicators of occupational health and safety: An employee and workplace level validation study. Safety Science. ↩︎
- Grabowski et al, M. (2007). Leading indicators of safety in virtual organizations. Safety Science. ↩︎
- Erikson, S. (2009). Performance indicators. Safety Science. ↩︎
- Jormakka, R. (2023). Measuring maturity of data-driven decision making: case study on selecting and applying a maturity model for a small-size professional services company. Lappeenranta. ↩︎
- Anderson, C. (2015). Creating a Data-Driven Organization: Practical Advice from the Trenches. In C. Anderson, Creating a Data-Driven Organization. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. ↩︎