Most of you know the value of data in your safety management system. However, a lot of safety management systems mainly show the number of incidents or days without injuries. Yes, they are great for marketing and showing off how great the company is doing. These KPI’s don’t add much for the company though. In order to really start adding value to the company, it is important to analyze the data and find out where important trends are.
Gather the Data
Getting incident data can often be hard to accomplish. Employees don’t always have the right forms at their fingertips, and simply forget about it when they have. Lowering the barrier to file an incident helps a lot to gather sufficient data, even to perform some kind of analysis. Mobile Apps are the way to go when it comes to lowering the barriers to file an incident. The employee just needs to take a picture or short video of what happened and the important data is gathered. Then the safety team can start to work on the case.
Individual Cases
Not a single safety incident is the same. Some require just a couple of hours to resolve, while others might take months or even years, depending on the severity of the injury. Handling every single case thoroughly is pretty important. It is even more important to handle certain questions in a structured manner so it is easy to compare results and find trends. We discuss this more thoroughly in our post on NC reports.
Call for Help
During the investigation of the case, it is important to ask knowledgeable people to help you find the correct information. As the safety manager you won’t necessarily have all the information at your fingertips. Make sure you involve different people from different departments to ensure you find the right information. A nice example is the financial impact, the finance department has a much better insight in the costs of an employee per hour.
Also make sure you don’t do everything, assign certain tasks to responsible people. This way you keep them involved and you don’t have to take on everything–which isn’t feasible anyway. In order to stay in control of all the tasks it is useful to check for platforms to help you in this manner. They allow you to get great insight on how the different tasks progress.
Combine the Data
When all the data is filled in and you have closed a couple dozen cases, you can start to analyze the data. The analysis is crucial to finding common denominators on why certain incidents happen. Finding out why these incidents happened is vital in starting improvement plans. These trends might not be as sexy as the KPI numbers without injuries, but they do add a lot more value. Actually providing more training to employees when that is shown as lacking behind helps the company improve and therefore improves the complete company.
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