Managing health and safety:health survey-4

Step 4: Measure your performance

Just like finance, production or sales, you need to measure your health and safety performance to find out if you are being successful. You need to know:
■where you are;
■where you want to be;
■what is the difference and why.

Active monitoring, before things go wrong, involves regular inspection and checking to ensure that your standards are being implemented and management controls are working.
Reactive monitoring, after things go wrong, involves learning from your mistakes, whether they have resulted in injuries and illness, property damage or near misses.
Two key components of monitoring systems

■Active monitoring (before things go wrong). Are you achieving the objectives and standards you set yourself and are they effective?

■Reactive monitoring (after things go wrong). Investigating injuries, cases of illness, property damage and near misses identifying in each case why performance was substandard.

You need to ensure that information from active and reactive monitoring is used to identify situations that create risks, and do something about them.
Priority should be given where risks are greatest. Look closely at serious events and those with potential for serious harm.
Both require an understanding of the immediate and the underlying causes of events. Investigate and record what happened find out why.

Ask yourself

1.Do you know how well you perform in health and safety?
2 How do you know if you are meeting your own objectives and standards for health and safety? Are your controls for risks good enough?
3 How do you know you are complying with the health and safety laws that affect your business?
4 Do your accident investigations get to all the underlying causes or do they stop when you find the first person who has made a mistake?
5 Do you have accurate records of injuries, ill health and accidental loss?

Step 5: Learn from experience audit and review

Monitoring provides the information to let you review activities and decide how to improve performance. Audits, by your own staff or outsiders, complement monitoring activities by looking to see if your policy, organisation and systems are actually achieving the right results.  They tell you about the reliability and effectiveness of your systems.

Learn from your experiences. Combine the results from measuring performance with information from audits to improve your approach to health and safety management.

Review the effectiveness of your health and safety policy, paying particular attention to:

■the degree of compliance with health and safety performance standards (including legislation);
■areas where standards are absent or inadequate;
■achievement of stated objectives within given timescales;
■injury, illness and incident data analyses of immediate and underlying causes, trends and common features.
These indicators will show you where you need to improve.

Ask yourself:

1 How do you learn from your mistakes and your successes?
2 Do you carry out health and safety audits?
3 What action is taken on audit findings?
4 Do the audits involve staff at all levels?
5 When did you last review your policy and performance?

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