Safety operational performance assessment and audits
‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure ‘is often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and quality-control expert credited with having launched the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement, and at other times it is attributed to Peter Drucker.
Safety Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be divided into the lagging ones that help to quantify something that has already happened (incidents and injuries) and leading ones that work proactively and help to prevent future safety events.
Many companies are following lagging KPIs such as fatality, lost time injury, recordable injury, first aids rates and also some leading KPIs such as near misses, deviations, training rates.
FVSAFETY developed Safety Culture Assessment (SCA). It uses a number of methods such as:
interviews with top and middle managers but also with employees’ representatives and operators,
questionnaires based safety practices,
meeting with focus groups,
document reviews with analyse of procedures, rules, SOP, guidelines, training supports, risk assessments,
field observations with behavior analyse,
performance audits, technical audits and behavior audits.
SCA can help to improve workplace safety by identifying strengths and weaknesses and define a road map for continuous improvement.