So, Why Do You Need Metrics Anyway? What Can You Do With Them Once You Have Them?
"What gets measured, gets done," says Michael D. Lawrence, of Summit Safety Technologies and speaker of BLR's upcoming webinar "EHS Metrics: How to Measure What Matters Most To Drive Safety in Your Organization." The webinar is on Wednesday, February (scroll down for more information about the webinar and how to register.)
"To manage something you must be able to measure it," says Lawrence, "and to measure something you have to be able to define it."
When helping companies implement EHS metrics, Lawrence finds that it doesn't take long for people to get totally overwhelmed in paperwork or measurement statistics. And when they do it suddenly doesn't work for them anymore.
Why?
Because they have all this data that they've collected and they don't know what to do with it.
The solution, says Lawrence, is to know what to measure so that you're not flooding your systems and flooding your head with stuff you don't need and aren't sure what to do with.
Understanding Metrics
In EHS, a metric is the measurable performance of an environmental or safety activity or program within an organization.
Metrics can drive performance toward:
- More efficient use of resources as well as people
- Improved compliance and profitability which is important because of this enforcement age we have moved into
- Improved general health and well-being of an organization and its workers
Safety professionals measure metrics in order to make good business decisions. In order to do that, a metric must be:
- Consistent
- Comparable
- Credible
- Relevant to the people using it
Tracking Incident Statistics
When tracking incident statistics, it may be helpful to identify those incidents that are related to process safety, as distinguished from personnel safety incidents that are not process-related.
In other words, you want to be able to integrate your safety measurements into the production side of things so that when you are having this discussion of what is working and what is not working, you are able to equate that into the business side of things.
Use indicators that focus on gaps or other specific factors that can affect a site's safety—and business—success.
Keep in mind that business leaders focus on revenue, profit, market share, new products, and increasing capacity, productivity, or efficiency. By measuring the current situation compared to quantifiable goals, business leaders make data-driven decisions. These are goals that you can actually attach a number to and know, with some certainty, that it is a reasonably good number.
Performance measures provide employees and management the tools they need to guide and measure their improvement on an ongoing basis by regularly measuring individual, team and site-wide performance.
This allows companies to measure not only what they need to improve but also shows them what they are doing well. This ultimately allows companies to fix what needs to be fixed and enhance what is working well.
By focusing on specifics, and sustaining employee involvement, metrics can prove to be a valuable tool for making improvement in overall safety performance.
Metrics Provide a "Window" for Management
Metrics in themselves will not achieve excellence, but do provide a "window" through which management can see the effectiveness of their systems.
Unfortunately, most safety metrics tell you what safety is not doing rather that what it is doing!
For example, reporting the number of injuries that occur in a given time period is an example of a safety metric. It's a lagging indicator because it has already happened but it's difficult to translate into how you are doing.
If you don't have an accident, it's hard to tell management that all is well. It could be you just got lucky and no one had an accident.
So you need to find measurable data that tells you how you are doing and how you can get better at what you are doing rather than on relying on something that you hope does not happen.
Thanks to Chris Kilbourne / Safety Daily Advisor BLR / BLR Business & Legal Reports
http://safetydailyadvisor.blr.com/archive/2011/1/25/safety_management_ehs_metrics.aspx?Source=SDF&effort=17
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