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As with any organizational function (sales, production, training, and finance), it is important to measure performance in health and safety in order to establish the effectiveness of current procedures. This article looks at the various tools organizations can use to monitor their health and safety performance, with particular emphasis on inspection and audits.
Why Is It Important to Monitor Health and Safety Performance?
Monitoring health and safety performance against agreed plans and standards helps organizations to find out if their current health and safety procedures are effective, and to determine if there is room for improvement or a need to implement new procedures. It can also help reinforce management commitment to workplace health and safety.
The business benefits of monitoring health and safety are:
- ensuring compliance with health and safety legislation
- increased employee well-being and morale
- improved safety performance and productivity
- reduced accident and injury rates
- reduced sick leave
- reduced litigation/compensation
- reduced health care costs
Health and safety monitoring is usually categorized in two ways: active and reactive.
1. Active Monitoring
Active monitoring takes place before things go wrong and involves regular inspection and checks to ensure health and safety procedures are being adhered to. They are useful for highlighting potential hazards in order to enable preventative action. Techniques for active monitoring include: spot checks, scheduled checks, sampling (examining specific aspects of health and safety such as compliance with food hygiene rules), inspections of workplace processes and equipment, surveillance, and auditing.
2. Reactive Monitoring
Reactive monitoring takes place after things go wrong. It involves learning from mistakes by investigating the causes of injuries, illness, accidents and incidents. The most common reactive monitoring tools in health and safety are accident records, which document accidents after they have occurred. However, accident statistics have a limited value – they can indicate where action needs to be taken, but should also be seen as one of a number of techniques that can be used to identify, manage and eliminate dangers. Some of these techniques are outlined below.
Inspection
Inspections can take various forms – they can be planned and systematic or they can be random spot checks. They provide a valuable opportunity to carry out a full-scale examination of all or part of a workplace. These inspections should not just focus on physical hazards; issues such as working time, training and workload can all have an impact on health and safety at work.
Inspections are useful tools for active monitoring of health and safety performance. Not only do they help to identify potential hazards, they also show employees that their organization takes health and safety matters seriously. It is important that the people who plan and carry out inspections have the appropriate skills and knowledge to enable them to identify hazards and risks and assess the conditions they find.
Auditing
Auditing is simply a structured process of data collection and analysis. It is a good way of benchmarking performance against set criteria. A health and safety audit will scrutinize safety and welfare in the workplace, by collecting data on the performance (efficiency, effectiveness and reliability) of the organization’s health and safety management system.
A health and safety audit usually involves completing a detailed questionnaire based on workplace observations, examination of evidence, and interviews with employees. It covers key aspects of health and safety management such as: health and safety policy, performance reviewing systems, allocation of responsibility for health and safety and promotion of a safe, healthy workplace.
Following the same procedure each time makes it easy to track changes to see where things are improving or deteriorating. It also helps to identify areas where action is needed most; thus helping organizations to set priorities and plan actions. Once auditing has been carried out, the actions necessary to correct any hazards/potential hazards should be identified and implemented.
Learn From Experience by Reviewing Performance
Reviewing should use the data from the audits and monitoring activities to take decisions about future courses of action and improve performance. Reviewing the effectiveness of health and safety policy, (with particular attention to indicators such as: the degree of compliance with health and safety performance standards and legislation; areas where standards are absent or inadequate; achievement of stated objectives within given timescales; and injury, illness and incident data) will reveal what needs to be improved in terms of health and safety management.
Reviews should result in effective follow-up, through action plans to remedy any areas of hazard. The speed and nature of response to these hazards should be controlled by the degree of risk involved and the availability of resources.
