Employee involvement is a key component of many safety management systems. However, companies often struggle to find meaningful ways to get every employee engaged. Employee involvement tends to end up constrained to small, fringe groups comprising only a fraction of … Read More
Safety Observations
Capturing and Using Leading Safety Metrics
Safety professionals collect data. It doesn’t make a difference if your focus is general safety, occupational hygiene, or a combination of the two. Performing safety observations, collecting air samples, and contributing data analysis to make inferences on potential hazards are … Read More
3 Reasons Why Regular Workplace Inspections and Observations Need to Be Made
Regular workplace inspections and observations provide a range of benefits to businesses and their employees. When implemented correctly, they help prevent illnesses, injuries, and incidents resulting from workplace hazards. Periodic workplace inspections and observations also ensure that businesses are complying … Read More
The Value of Including Safe Observations
The safety profession has an unhealthy fixation on measurements based purely on negative values. OSHA recordable and lost time injuries are the first such statistics that spring to mind (both lagging and—I would suggest—negative indicators.) Once they occur, they cannot … Read More
Weighted Percent Safe – A New Risk Metric for Safety Observations
In a previous article, Assigning Severity Ratings to Safety Observation Findings, the concept of incorporating severity into standard safety observations for unsafe/at-risk observation findings was suggested. Doing this would allow observers to classify findings according to their potential level of … Read More
Percent Safe is NOT a Risk-based Performance Indicator
Unlocking the secrets of Percent Safe Safety inspections and observations are conducted at almost all workplaces. Unfortunately, many companies collect only unsafe findings, creating an incomplete picture of risk. Companies that do collect safe observations tend to use a standard … Read More
