The Top 5 Safety KPI's You Should Be Tracking

The focus of this article will mainly be leading indicators as KPI's. A lot of companies track lagging indicators, which are still good, but the leading indicators will actually help you to prevent the expenditure of money rather than just mitigating it.

This first safety KPI that you should be tracking is probably one you are familiar with but you may have trouble tracking it or getting meaningful data from it! -- Near Misses. Near misses give you a very measurable way to predict incidents, injuries, and even deaths by using the safety pyramid.  If you struggle with getting employees to report near misses or if you don't have a good way to track and manage them I would recommend trying this tool. Use tools like the one I mentioned to see what is causing your near misses and what you can do to prevent them in the future. 

The second safety KPI that you should be tracking is your audit frequency. How often do your audits take place, are they taking place on time, and what are the findings of your safety audits? Tracking these will lead to improvement, but one of the most important pieces here is the follow up. Which leads me right into number three!

The third KPI you need to be paying attention to is your action items. When you are gathering near miss and audit data you should be creating corrective and preventative actions that you can follow up on and track. The actions should define what the issues are and how you are going to solve them! Pay close attention to the time frame it takes to complete the actions or are they being completed at all. 

These last three should directly impact your bottom line as they will all help prevent incidents and injuries in your company.

The fourth safety KPI that you should be tracking is training, but specifically the frequency and retention of the training. How often is some sort of training taking place? Classes, toolbox talks, and micro training sessions really help with a safety culture because they keep it top of mind. It is also very important to track the retention of the training! Impromptu, single employee quizzes are a great way to see how much of the material is being retained without taking up additional time from your employees work day. Knowing your retention rates will tell you if the training needs to be changed, and it's going to help you measure the status of your safety culture.

The fifth safety KPI that you should be tracking is risk assessments! These give you a very measurable way to see the riskiest places in your business and create plans to mitigate them. Being able to not only measure the risks in your business, but also rank them then it becomes very easy to focus on high risk areas and start eliminating the issues. Once again it is important to measure the frequency that risk assessments are taking place. This will help you to understand what the current risks are in your business, which puts you in a better position to solve them.

These five safety KPI's will most likely make the biggest immediate difference for your company as they all have the potential to increase safety, increase safety culture, and decrease fines. If you have any questions, need help, or don't know where to begin tracking these just click the button below!