How Do I Measure Safety?

The problem with measuring safety is that you're actually measuring the absence of something (injury).  You can take no measurable action and get lucky  by having no workplace injuries, or you can take tons of measurable actions and get tons of injuries. We improve processes by using past patterns to take future action, but "past patterns" in safety means someone got hurt, or worse. So the trick is looking for the patterns that took place before the injury and measuring (and improving) those. 

The Problem with Reporting

Most organizations have some focus on safety, the intensity of which depends on the kind of organization (manufacturing orgs are generally less safe than an office building). So measuring and improving safety is all about establishing and measuring enabling indicators - that is to say, those behaviors and circumstances that have a pattern of leading to injuries.

Safety awareness often increases reports of safety incidences.

The Hawthorne effect describes how observation changes outcomes. In various studies, individuals being observed altered their behavior because they knew they were being observed. Other versions of this concept show up in physics as well (the observer effect), where observation (by a person or instrument) alters the behavior of a particle. In short, when we pay attention to something, we often influence its behavior by our attention. 

This is also true of safety and other kinds of compliance (e.g. workplace harassment). Most organizations offer safety training and awareness campaigns as a way to reduce safety incidences and injuries (common measures of safety). However, training people about what and how to report often results in an increase in reported incidences. In this very common situation, reports of safety violations (like a spill that could cause a slip-and-fall) usually increase after safety training. The logic is pretty solid here:

• Reported safety incidences (e.g. spills) are a common method of identifying patterns in circumstances that could lead to injury.
• A higher count of reported predictors (e.g. spills) increases the likelihood of an injury and so decreases the measurable safety of the environment.
• Actions taken to ensure a safe environment includes reminding (often through training) employees about what and how to report those incidences so they can be prevented.
• Reminding / training employees about what and how to report will increase the likelihood that they will report something that may otherwise have not been reported.

This last point is the key. An increase in reported incidences doesn't mean there was an increase in actual incidences, just reports. But it stings because you spend money on safety training and your reported safety incidences goes up. 
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All of that said, don't let the false positive of an increase in reporting keep you from measuring those enabling indicators (like the spills) because those continue to be the right predictors of a safe work environment.

Greg Brisendine is a business leader, author, playwright, and poet. His book Measuring Success: A Practical Guide to KPIs is available on Kindle, in paperback, and on Audible.