Using Data to Make a Safe Bet

“The key to having a healthy safety culture is moving safety-related activities and policies from a secondary consideration to a primary focus,” says John Moore of Franklin Building Supply. “Safety can’t be the effect of production-based decisions, it has to be the cause of decisions on your production floor.”

What does it look like to have safety as a primary focus? It starts with an unreserved commitment from management. Keeping uninjured employees on the job, paying lower workers compensation premiums, and creating an environment where everyone feels safe and are motivated to show up for work all contribute to the overall profitability of a company. “Operational decisions focused on safety instead of production throughput are typically not the least expensive option at the time of purchase,” says Ryan Kaderavek of Carpentry Contractors of America. “Management needs to have that big picture in mind to remain focused on safety as the top priority.”

With management commitment comes safety policies and processes that make it easier for employees to comply and invest in safety procedures. “But it starts with employees understanding the benefits of safety-focused decisions, it takes good communication and distribution of responsibility for safety to every worker on the line,” says Evan Luffred of Shelter Systems Limited.

"Safety can't be the effect of production-based decisions, it has to be the cause of decisions on your production floor."

Along with establishing employee buy in to a safety-focused operation, safety data needs to drive decision making. “The data will tell you where you need to focus your attention and it will also tell you where your policies and procedures are making a difference,” says John. “This means you want to have a comprehensive and standardized way to collect injury and illness data through required reporting procedures. This includes near-miss incidents as well.”

Evan adds that analyzing OSHA logs and conducting peer review on each reportable incident is also important to understand not only frequency and severity, but also root causes to determine potential remedies in policies or procedures. “For example, we put QR codes throughout our facility to make it easy for employees to immediately access and fill out safety incident reports,” John says.

Collecting the data is only one-third of the work. Determining who has access to the data and developing regular review of the data is also important to understand what is going on and how policy changes or training may be helpful at reversing undesirable safety trends. “You have to be looking at the data regularly. Fortunately, there are a lot of software options out there to help track and analyze safety data,” says Ryan. 

Finally, data analysis identifies areas that need additional focus. Sometimes this is in the form of toolbox talks or informal training sessions at work stations, sometimes the data suggests a need for a policy change or wholesale change. “Any changes need to come with realistic timeframes to see results in the data, and the more drastic the change, the more incremental the approach needs to be to ensure everyone is on board and following it,” says Evan.