The Best Way to Measure Workplace Safety
There is a preoccupation in many industries for calculating basic safety using the rate or severity of lost time mishaps and happenings. Sadly, there’s only a very tenuous connection between safety at work and the number of lost time accidents. The reasons for this are many and varied but it’s turning out to be relatively clear that hidden accidental injuries such as back strains, muscle strains and repeated strain damage are a symptom in injury figures. There’s a developing body of opinion that numerous people will use these non-visible accidental injuries as a means of having time from work. We have observed that as soon as non-visible accidental injuries reached 20% of all incidents an issue of false claims came forth.
We also found that places and sites that had average or less than average management skills in the workforce received the most mishaps. Put simply, the reported accident rate was a reflection of the management skills in that area. One of the greatest complications of looking at accident rates as a measure of basic safety is that it is quite possible to work unsafely for quite some time and never incur a major accident. This is probably the most key elements in accident prevention or improving workplace safety. Behavior speaks louder than words or statistics.
There’s also a symptom in the way that we train people for management positions. We use educational methods to teach practical skills and no longer is that sufficient. We wouldn’t use educational methods to teach people to swim because we know it would not work. Yet in all our wisdom we use classroom techniques to teach people what’s basically a practical skill. There’s plenty of evidence world wide from study that this method doesn’t work but we persist in it. You can go to any web site promoted by training businesses and they will exhort you to join their management program which is entirely classroom-based. Furthermore, they will charge a lot of money for it. So the return on the management training investment is pitifully low.
To create safer workplaces we must be able to train our supervisors, team leaders and managers in practical skills that are not normally on the agenda of most on-the-job education programs. We must coach them how to influence, how to lead change, how to run a safety observation program, how to involve their staff in creating a safer workplace, how to use positive reinforcement as an easy way of managing performance, and we must do this in a practical environment where they work rather than a classroom.
The failure to do this will result in a continuing cycle of workplace mishaps and unsafe conduct. We have used the incorrect methods and measured the incorrect outcomes. This is why we are still having so many accidents and incidents at work.
Weldon Castro is a workplace safety expert.