What is a KPI in health and safety?
A health and safety KPI is a target that helps measure how well your organisation is meeting safety standards. KPIs allow you to track your progress towards a specific safety goal, usually set against the benchmark of industry-specific standards and compliance.
The data you gather through tracking your health and safety KPIs can paint a picture of how your safety culture is developing and, hopefully, improving. Different organisations may have differing health and safety KPIs, but for safety professionals across all industries, they are a valuable tool for assessing a company’s overall health and safety performance.
Why are health and safety KPIs important?
Health and safety KPIs act like a roadmap for a company’s safety culture. They can show you if you’re heading in the right direction or where you need to course-correct. They provide a fairly accurate overview of an organisation’s safety culture, making it easier for safety managers to share progress updates with senior leaders and other stakeholders.
When you track your organisation’s metrics, you can make better decisions about workplace health and safety practices and improve your safety culture over time. Implementing KPIs will help you to spot trends and head off poor safety management before it poses a real danger to employees and the workplace. They can highlight other areas for improvement too, from staff training and engagement to updating your health and safety software. With the right data, you can make your workplace safer, more efficient, more engaged and more productive.
Of course, KPIs are not the only factors to consider when assessing your organisation’s safety performance. Health and safety KPIs capture numerical and statistical data, but might not always highlight important qualitative insights directly from employees. That is to say that KPIs alone won’t present you with a solution. You should draw on and analyse a range of health and safety data from a range of sources.
Additionally, while KPIs can highlight problems and missed opportunities, collecting data isn’t the same as making changes. You must also interrogate the underlying causes of workplace incidents and take the action needed to correct them. Once you’ve made these changes, you need to monitor how effective they are. Your KPI findings are useful but shouldn’t be final; keep changing and adjusting your safety practices as you need to.
Understanding health and safety KPIs
To best understand health and safety KPIs, we need to understand the difference between leading and lagging indicators. These indicators are important metrics that help to show how and where potential hazards and incidents could occur, highlighting where improvements to safety practices need to be made.
Leading indicators are all about the future. They are proactive measures that look to prevent incidents before they happen. For example, good hazard spotting and near miss reporting are leading indicators, providing you with data that enables you to make changes before an incident or serious accident occurs. Other examples of leading indicators include regular risk assessment and audits, or tracking employees’ engagement with training opportunities.
By contrast, lagging indicators are reactive. These safety KPIs include things like accident reports or the number of days lost to illness or injury. Lagging indicators are used to assess the effectiveness of past actions and identify what, if anything, still needs improvement. An organisation’s lagging indicators might also include accident rates or the amount a company has paid in compensation to its workers. While these indicators measure quite different things, they are both important for creating a comprehensive workplace safety assessment.
The top 10 health and safety KPIs
While not every company will focus on the same health and safety KPIs, we think there are some that all safety professionals should consider. Here are our top 10 safety performance measures you should track, plus the reasons why tracking them could have a positive impact on your workplace safety culture.
1. Total recordable incident rate
The total recordable incident rate (TRIR) is the number of workplace injuries, illnesses and incidents that have happened within a set period of time. The TRIR is often calculated at a ‘per 100 employees’ rate and is one of the most straightforward ways of assessing the overall state of your company’s safety management.
You can calculate your workplace TRIR by taking the number of incidents recorded and dividing it by 200,000, then multiplying this figure by the number of hours worked. For example, if there have been 5 incidents across 100,000 hours worked, the TRIR would be 10.
This KPI is a lagging indicator and can be used to assess if safety performance is improving or worsening over time. It is a good general metric of safety standards, providing managers with a high-level but clear overview of where safety management systems need to be strengthened.
2. Number of reportable incidents
Paired with the TRIR, tracking the total number of reportable incidents is another crucial lagging metric. By ensuring that you have an effective incident reporting system in place, you can quickly and easily look at the number of incidents reported within a specific period. Having this data readily available makes spotting potential risks easier, so that you can take steps to prevent them from escalating. Significantly, it’s also a legal requirement under RIDDOR to report any incidents that result in injury, so many organisations will already be collecting data on this KPI.
3. Accident frequency rate
The accident frequency rate (AFR), again calculated per 100 employees, is the number of incidents within a set period that resulted in damage, injury or illness. The accident frequency rate is a good illustration of where there are more serious gaps in your safety management. For companies working towards a culture of ‘zero harm’, having an AFR of zero is the way to show this. Like the TRIR, the AFR is a good metric for conducting a high-level assessment of a company’s safety performance.
4. Number of accidents
Recording and analysing the number of workplace accidents is useful for highlighting which dangerous incidents are most common and where they occur. When combined with an AFR, you can start to build a comprehensive picture of where there are serious gaps in your safety management. You can then use this data to inform what preventative actions need to be taken and stop future incidents from becoming dangerous events.
5. Lost time injury frequency rate
This safety KPI is not about the number of hours of work (and associated productivity) lost through injury. What it measures is the rate of incidents serious enough to lead to injury and employees missing work.
To work out the value of the lost time injury frequency rate, take the number of lost time injuries and divide that by the total number of hours worked in the period you are looking at. Then multiply that number by 200,000. So if you recorded 3 lost time injuries across 100,000 hours of working time, that would result in a lost time injury frequency rate of 6.
6. Volume of near misses and near miss reporting rate
We know that reporting near misses is still an area for improvement for many organisations. Yet it’s a safety KPI that can be instrumental in spotting patterns and preventing accidents. A near miss is an incident that could have caused injury or damage but ultimately did not. Ensuring that you have an accurate record of near misses, alongside hazard spotting and incident reporting, is an important piece of your safety management puzzle.
7. Safety event trends by department or location
Depending on the size of your workplace and the industry, there will be different risks present across different departments and locations. With this in mind, it is important to track incidents (such as near misses) and other safety events in all areas of your organisation. This lagging indicator will show you what incidents are happening more often than others and where. This then allows you to analyse any correlations between departments or locations and take action accordingly. A great way to visualise your safety data is with Notify’s Safety Intelligence dashboards.
To do this effectively, you should ensure that employees are actively engaged in reporting and able to provide up-to-date, ‘on the ground’ information about safety management in the location where they work.
8. Number of EHS audits performed
Do you know how many health and safety audits were carried out in your organisation in the last month? What about in the past year? Tracking how often safety processes are reviewed and updated through audits and inspections is a crucial part of your health and safety management. This leading indicator will help to anticipate any risks ahead of starting a new project, for example. It can also show if you are auditing frequently enough or if you need to increase how often you review your processes. They can also help you identify areas of improvement, whether that process or equipment.
9. Corrective action closure rate
As we have mentioned, it’s not enough to just track these health and safety KPIs. Proactive safety management requires analysing the data gathered, deciding what corrective actions must be taken and then ensuring these are carried out. Your corrective action closure rate is the measure of how often and how quickly these corrective actions are taken over a set period.
You can use this KPI to assess how efficient your incident management processes are. If there is a high percentage of corrective actions that aren’t carried out in time or are missed altogether, you will know that some aspect of your incident management isn’t working well.
10. Incident close-out rate
Another good indication of how efficient your reporting process is is the rate of incident close-out. This metric looks at how well safety incidents are dealt with, from reporting to assigning corrective actions. Incident close-out rate can be represented by the percentage of incidents that are dealt with out of the total number of incidents within a specific timeframe.
Furthermore, it’s a measure of your team’s ability, engagement and level of training. Are your employees equipped to report an incident or near miss? Do managers know who and how to delegate follow-up actions to? If your incident close-out rate is low, these are some areas you can look to make improvements in.
Why trust Notify for health and safety KPI tracking?
If you’d like more information or support with measuring your workplace’s health and safety KPIs, then Notify Technology can help.
We’ve helped hundreds of organisations, from manufacturers to service providers, turn safety data into meaningful action. Our health and safety software is built with input from safety leaders, and is trusted by companies like EPTA, Wolseley, Menzies Distribution and McDonalds to track KPIs that matter.
With tools like real-time dashboards, mobile incident reporting, and action tracking, Notify helps safety professionals move from guesswork to insights…fast. We’ve seen customers reduce incident rates, increase near miss reporting, and improve audit completion performance just by using the right safety KPIs.
We believe safety is not just about collecting numbers, it’s about using data to make decisions that protect people, improve performance and simplify compliance. Book a demo today and see how Notify can help.