PPSA - Safety Performance Metrics

Safety Performance Metrics – Part 3 – The Impact of Managers and Engineers

How much do you know about your safety process? Stop, don’t call your Safety or Human Resources Manager – this question is meant for you. Does it actually prevent injuries? Does it support company values, goals, and objectives? Is it designed to address specific problems in your workplace? Or does it merely track compliance with regulations? If you aren’t sure, now you can make that call to the safety department. Safety can be treated like a necessary evil or it can be one of the useful tools you use to move your company forward and preserve the health and productivity of your employees.

In the two previous articles on the topic of Safety Performance Metrics, I discussed traditional “downstream” or trailing indicators and the trend towards the more proactive “upstream” or leading indicators. The basic trailing measurements are Total Case Incident Rate (TCIR), Severity Rate (SR), and Incident Costs (IC). They give us a good idea of what happened after an injury or occupational illness incident: how serious the incident was, if it caused the employee to miss time from their regular work duties, and how much the incident cost the company. Measurements of accident prevention activities are considered leading indicators because they look at activities that occur prior to an injury or illness.

I’ve already discussed what to measure, so in this last article of the series I want to delve a little deeper into the effectiveness of your safety activities and measurements. Ineffective safety activities can lead to a false sense of security – you think you are doing all the right things, but the message just isn’t getting through.

Let’s say the Safety Manager holds a monthly meeting for Supervisors and the topic is Lift Truck Safety. Of the Supervisors who attend, one has a meeting for his employees within a week and discusses how pedestrians and lift truck drivers can work together safely. He listens to their comments. He follows this up with an observation of those areas that have resulted in injury or complaints in the past. He identifies a problem and works to correct it

Another Supervisor puts off his department meeting until the last few days of the month and then uses the majority of the time to discuss a current production issue. He may turn in an observation or two, but doesn’t take the time to talk to employees about potential problem areas, doesn’t review past incident reports for his area, and doesn’t spend enough time to make a good observation. Both Supervisors would get the same credit for their activities, but clearly, only one is effectively managing safety. Unless there is an injury in one of the departments, they will end up with identical Safety Performance Metric scores for the month.

So how can you know who’s doing an effective job? Actually, some of the people reading this are probably in the best position to know...

--- Plant, Mill, and Department Managers know which Supervisors and Team Leaders manipulate data. They know which ones pass on information by rote, simply because they are required to do it.

--- Engineers and Maintenance personnel often know problem areas in a plant or mill better than anyone else in the facility. They know which areas work well because they are managed well and which ones get by on luck.

As you were reading this, you may have even mentally assigned a name or two to the description of the less effective Supervisor above. Don't let them get by with it - challenge them to be better. You don’t allow sloppy production work, so you already have the mechanisms in place to correct unacceptable behavior. A common theme from The Pulp & Paper Safety Association’s Executive Eagle Award[i] recipients has been that they expected their employees – all of them – to do the job safely. Expected them to. Demanded it. Got it.

The Safety Manager provides direction and technical expertise. They establish what gets measured and how to track it. However, the attitude of the entire management team will determine how much support the safety process actually receives. And, ultimately, how effective it is.

[i] The Executive Eagle Award is presented annually by P&PSA to a CEO or VP who exemplifies outstanding leadership and support for safety in their organization. For past recipients, use the navigation menu at left to access awards pages.