Have you ever considered ways to measure your safety program for effectiveness?
Many companies decide to use their incident rate as a safety measuring stick. After all, it's a metric commonly used in contractor vetting processes, and it's reported in the aggregate by industry under the Bureau of Labor Services (BLS). Must be a good thing right?
Well... this is one of those cases where the 'official' metric is not the best fit, especially for smaller companies. Turns out, your incident rate is statistically invalid unless you happen to be calculating with millions of work hours. Check out this quote from the April 2021 Professional Safety Journal:
"Unless hundreds of millions of work hours are amassed, the confidence bands are so wide that TRIR [incident rate] cannot be accurately reported to even one decimal point. The implication is that the TRIR for almost all companies is virtually meaningless because they do not accumulate enough work hours." (https://www.eei.org/-/media/Project/EEI/Documents/Issues-and-Policy/Power-to-Prevent-SIF/PSJ---TRIR-Paper.pdf)
This whole article is pretty down about incident rates in general. First, they do not predict or show any correlation with fatalities, which means that companies with higher incident rates are no more likely to have a fatality than a company with a lower incident rate. This is a topic of active study in the safety world, as it's becoming more apparent that the strategies to prevent lower-impact incidents are not always the same ones that are helpful in preventing higher-impact incidents, such as fatalities.
Further, incident rates are sometimes embedded into performance management systems for employees. For many companies, it is a requirement that one annual goal for each employee be safety-related. This is a good step in general, but incident rates have a way of sneaking into these goals. For frontline employees, this can mean "no incidents or near misses," which discourages honest reporting, and for managers the goal is often "an improved incident rate." However, as the article discusses, the improved incident rate is subject to random variation much of the time.
The article also says that incident rates are not helpful in gauging program effectiveness over the short-term. It might be easy to infer that because your incident rate went down over a couple years, you must be doing something right. Incident rates are popular measures for current safety initiatives for companies for this reason. However, as the article discusses, incident rates are not useful for evaluation unless there's 100 months of data -- that's over eight years. There's no room for gauging shorter-term initiatives if that's the case.
Well... what now?
Over the next couple of weeks we'll be discussing better strategies to measure your safety program. If you want to get a leg up, you can go ahead and search up "leading and lagging indicators" -- but it's a wild world out there, with lots of information. We're hoping we can break it down into manageable pieces for our member companies in the next few posts.
