How to Create Meaningful Safety Graphs

I see this a lot in executive presentations. I don’t know how it’s a useful measurement tool when it’s something like 1 in the entire division over the course of a year.

Something like accidents/hours worked would be a better measurement and allow for “normalizing” if hours significantly increased – say through an acquisition or some such.

normalizing is done by people attempting to twist data to suit their needs. so while it would seem to make sense to allow for more accidents if more hours are worked i think this is what you would call a slippery slope. with this said, my company does take hours into account but i think simply counting lost time events as shown above is probably best. our goal, no matter how big or small the company or how many hours worked, should be always be 0 accidents.

Ron,

What type of approach would you take to display your safety information when you have multiple accidents in one day and you are also keeping track of multiple safety categories, i.e. near misses, first aids, recordable injuries, lost time injuries, cumulative total recordable injuries (recordable + lost time) and hours worked for the month?

Here is a examlple of how we publish our safety data:

Month First Aids Rec. InjuryLost Time Total Rec Cum. TRI Hrs Worked
1/5/08 12 2 0 2 5.15 388326
2/5/08 14 0 0 0 2.69 353885
3/5/08 14 1 1 2 3.48 408362
4/5/08 8 0 1 1 3.22 400591
5/5/08 10 3 0 3 4.09 405722
6/5/08 19 1 1 2 4.15 453344
7/5/08 9 0 1 1 3.9 409834

Random thoughts:

1) I agree that some kind of accident ratio is in order. Per mile driven? Per trip taken? Seems like there is a SS measure of “opportunities for error” measure there. 0 sounds like a great goal, but there is some context. If that’s your goal and you’re a roofing contractor, you are always staring at evidence of your failure even though you might be smashing the industry average. If you operate an insurance claims office and you’re seeing 5 accidents per year among your adjusters, you really are failing.

2) Safety theory (whatever that may be) suggests that for every bad accident, there are X minor ones and Y near hits. I have seen encouragement to keep track of all of the misses as well as the hits. Maybe overkill? Still, whenever you’re measuring teeny little numbers, you aren’t measuring anything useful. I have a sore spot on this because my mgt sometimes looks past my months on end with no injuries, then we have a spate of unrelated things, and they say, “3 last year, 6 this year – your injury rates have doubled!” Yes, random variation looks bad when you put it like that.