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Taking care with HSE metrics


Corporate dashboards will often bring together a series of metrics that are intended to give a balanced view of how the whole organisation or a division, directorate or department is performing.  It is often the case that health and safety performance indicators will appear alongside those traditionally used to drive financial performance of the business such as sales, production, utilisation, costs and head count.  The increasing importance of Health and Safety, and hence the desire to improve performance, has been driven in part by the clearly growing negative consequences of failure to protect employees and the public, but also the increasing desire for organisations to be seen as agents of good in the community.

There is, however, a danger that an executive viewing an improving trend on his Health and Safety metrics may be misled into thinking that this improving trend will continue.  With other measures, like improving sales or improving efficiency, it will often be the case that the reasons for improvement can be expected to be maintained at least in the short to medium term.  Opening new markets, launching new products or improving sales capability are positive factors that drive improved sales and profit that once earned generally do not disappear overnight.  Similarly, performance improvements implemented to drive efficiency are likely to endure over the medium term at least.  With improving Health and Safety metrics cannot be a point at which back are patted because the next workplace injury, the next fatality or the next catastrophic disaster can come out of the blue.  Health and safety professionals have long understood that there is a safety incident Pyramid.  One study carried out by Conoco Philips Marine in 2003 identified that for every fatal incident you would expect to see 30 lost time incidents and 300 near misses.  What the Pyramid cannot help with is determining when in 331 incidents the fatality will occur.  It could be the first or the 331st.  Constant vigilance is required for sustained improvement in Health and Safety.

It is also the case that many organisations do not have a firm grasp of the Health and Safety risks they are taking.  Even companies with seemingly mature risk assessment and safety management procedures can fall foul of risk taken for operational expediency at a relatively low level in the organisation.  For example, when a production plant’s fire protection systems have a reported fault it is very easy for plant managers to take the risk, continue production and just make sure someone gets out to fix the fault as soon as possible.  Or the shut-off valve that is jammed open. As long as the plant keeps producing it’s not a problem. Both these scenarios expose the organisation to significant risk, the kind of risk that could lead to catastrophe. However, neither would show up in LTI or a Loss of Containment reports.  They may not even show up on planned maintenance metrics: the fire control system was fixed in two days and the valve isn’t meant to be looked at for another 18 months “lets just sweep those under the carpet”.  Which leads us to consider the completeness and accuracy (to borrow the accounting phrase) of Health and Safety metrics.

Measurement of metrics in Health and Safety do not typically have the same rigour that financial measures have associated with them.  There is unlikely to be the level of external scrutiny that financial statements have applied to them.  The auditing profession has well over a century of collective experience in being able to assess financial statements.  In comparison, the effort expended in verifying Health and Safety performance measures could be described as cursory.  Whether incidents or near misses are reported will remain a function of how much importance each organisation, from the top to the bottom, places on improving its health and safety.  At the end of the day, it will come down to the organisation’s culture. Does the foreman view an injury to one of his team as an opportunity to learn, for him and the whole organisation, or something negative to try and avoid reporting if possible?  “You can still drive the truck with your arm bandaged, John” and “Sally twisted ankle won’t stop her coming in to answer the phones”.

Cold health and safety metrics do not tell the same story that a day, a week, a month visit by an experienced external health and safety manager or process safety engineer would quickly provide.  This is why the follow up and closure of external audit and assessment actions is one of the better ways of measuring the cultural risk an organisation faces. 

However, changing culture is not a simple task.  It has to start with leadership commitment and then engage the whole workforce in:

·         Understanding what the organisation is trying to achieve

·         Explaining the behaviours that are required and encouraged
Building capability to deliver safety performance improvement.

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