Why You Need a Safety KPI Scorecard

You and your team work tirelessly to improve safety in your organization. But implementing efforts isn’t the problem. The problem is measuring your success and finding ways to show your success to upper management as concrete numbers.

If you’re like many safety teams, you probably struggle with this process, even if you conduct routine safety audits. Audits, are helpful, but they don’t present a complete picture, and may not fully show the data in a demonstrative way.

What if we said there’s a better way?

Instead of relying solely on safety audit checklists, you can present a more complex picture of your data with a safety KPI scorecard. Here’s why your team should also be looking into safety KPI scorecards.

What Is a Safety KPI Scorecard?

A safety KPI scorecard is a set of leading indicators your team can routinely review to track your progress on specific safety objectives. It combines the concept of a safety audit checklist with key performance indicators, a common business tool used to monitor progress and check effectiveness.

You can use an advanced safety management software to track your KPIs in real time, or you can use something as simple (and inefficient) as an Excel spreadsheet. Either way, the scorecard gives you a tangible measure of safety performance.

The Benefits of Scorecards

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Safety, after all, is at least 70% awareness.

When you take the time to actively measure your safety KPIs, you’re building a tool that allows your team to see your progress at any given moment. You can see your progress over the course of a week, a month, or even a year.

Better still, scorecards go one step further than basic audit checklists. Instead of an all-or-nothing measurement, you can get an assessment that accounts for everything in between.

Choosing Your KPIs

The key to using safety KPI scorecards effectively is to keep things simple. Start by tracking essential safety metrics, rather than attempting to track every available metric. Many safety teams make the mistake of trying to take on too much, thinking that more safety data is better. The truth is that there’s no reason to collect data if you cannot specifically say how you’re going to use it.

Safety scorecards also work best if you focus on leading indicators rather than lagging indicators. Tracking the number of injuries is a lagging indicator, while the number of training hours is more of a leading indicator. The idea is to look at safety metrics you can measure before problems occur and leverage those metrics to stop workplace accidents before they happen.

The Smarter Way to Do Safety

We think there’s a smarter way to do safety. Safety KPI scorecards are one step in the right direction - they’re all about using data to proactively deal with problems, rather than reacting to incidents after the fact.

If you agree that it’s time to change the way you think about safety, we’d like to show you how EHS software can strengthen your team. Get in touch today to let us demonstrate a smarter way to approach safety at work.