Measuring Occupational Health and Safety performance is an integral and vital part of good management. If applied correctly, it allows companies and health and safety managers to identify whether they are doing enough on safety and health matters or whether they need to take further actions.

Measuring performance is part of the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) also known as the Deming Wheel, or Deming Cycle.

Good quality monitoring will help the health and safety manager in identifying Occupational Health and Safety problems. The causes of these problems and the changes required to rectify them. Therefore monitoring must add value to any health and safety management system rather than just being a tick box exercise.

Company Roles and Responsibilities

Include:

Ensuring there is a process for monitoring, reporting and reviewing Occupational Health and Safety performance
Ensuring there is a process in place to report incidents immediately
Reviewing safety performance reports at regular intervals
Setting pre-determined measures to enable safety performance monitoring and measuring
Reporting on Occupational Health and Safety performance to Regulators, as required

Employee Roles and Responsibilities

Include:

Supporting the company and the health and safety managers OHS policies and procedures
Cooperating with the company and receiving safety information and training
Reporting any activity or defect relating to work activities which they know is likely to endanger the safety of themselves or that of any other person

How to Decide on What Needs to be Monitored

So where to start ? Monitoring performance against a range of pre-determined measures is one of the most frequently used techniques of monitoring. Selection of the correct measures can include:

OSH objectives
The risk profile of the company
Contractual requirements which can sometimes specify frequency of monitoring
Legal requirements including regulatory bodies such as OSHAD, SPSA or Dubai Municipality
Fatalities
Injuries resulting in lost work days
Occupational illness resulting in lost work days
Dangerous occurrences

What are the Types of Monitoring

There are many different types of monitoring. They can generally be categorised as either ‘active’ or ‘reactive’:

Active Methods – Monitor the design, installation and operation of management arrangements. These tend to be preventive in nature, including but not limited to:

Progress monitoring of Occupational Health and Safety objectives
Occupational Health and Safety performance reviews
Review of training assessment, records and needs
Examination of Occupational Health and Safety documents
Workplace safety inspections
Occupational Health and Safety management system audits
Environmental monitoring
Health surveillance
Behavioural observations
Safety tours
Safety sampling
Safety surveys

Reactive methods – Monitor evidence of poor safety and health practice. They can also identify better practices that may be transferred to other parts of a business, including:

Accident incidence rates
Ill-health incidence rates
Accident frequency rates
Accident severity rates
Sickness absence
Property or product damage
Incidents, hazards and near miss

Health and Safety Managers should consider the following while deciding on the frequency of the monitoring of occupational health and safety performance.

Who Will be Responsible for Monitoring Performance ?

Companies should define the roles and responsibilities including who should monitor the safety performance. The company should ensure that the responsible employees are provided with the following, as a minimum:

Information of responsibilities, what to monitor, how often and to whom to report
Adequate resources for monitoring
Adequate information, instruction, supervision and training for monitoring methods

The health and safety manager should develop a process to evaluate the occupational health and safety performance which will guide the company on the action to be followed based on the monitoring results. This should include ways to;

Improve safety and health performance
Learn from human, system and entity failures
Share lessons learned
Plan future training

Reviewing Performance

Companys should review safety performance against the companies policy on a pre-agreed basis. There are different reasons for why a company should review performance. These include;

Changes within the company that could mean that existing performance measures are out of date
The occupational health and safety objectives and targets have changed which could result in changes to what needs to be measured
The current measures do not help the health and safety manager or the company to understand how well they are managing safety and health

Training

Effective training is essential to achieve quality monitoring of Occupational health and safety performance. The health and saftey manager should provide training in languages and in a format that employees will understand. These include;

Training managers on effective safety management
Training responsible employees on specific aspects of occupational health and safety
Improving the skills of the employee
Improving safety performance monitoring skills

Periodic refresher training should be conducted to ensure employees competency is maintained. This can include:

Where training certificates have expired
Where identified as part of a training needs analysis
Where risk assessment findings identify training as a measure to control risks
Where there is a change in legal requirements
Where incident investigation findings recommend refresher training

Don’t forget to record and maintain accurate training records.

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Health and Safety Topic – Measuring Occupational Health and Safety performance