Measure of safety performance.

• Author: McKay, Brian
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: BUILDING ALASKA

There is elegance in the statement that "what gets measured, gets managed." I have been influenced by this maxim, whether I knew it or not, throughout my entire life. From grade school to grad school and into the working world, it seems that the more something is getting graded, analyzed, or measured the more effort, time, or activity that process gets. Grades, on papers and on your report card, are important metrics on whether you have gained some set of skills or have been imparted some important knowledge, and it is important to gauge your relative understanding of the material compared to your peers. That I wouldn't argue against (my ten-year-old son Aidan would certainly argue against this); measuring productivity and compliance within your company is an essential element within your business line; measuring competitive advantage between your competitors--a must.

Safety Rates

Safety often gets measured as a rate. A rate is any given incident over a time value. The most common incident rate in business now is arguably your company's recordable rates or lost time injury rate. The recordable rate is defined as the number of incidents times 200,000 divided by the total number of hours worked in a year. For example, if an employer had 1 recordable incident in a year; you would multiply that by 200,000 (the expected number of hours worked by 100 workers in a calendar year) and then divide that by the actual number of hours worked by the company in any given year. For the sake of easy math, let's say that a company had 1 recordable injury in 2015 and an average of 100 employees (1 Injury x 200,000) / 200,000 (hours worked) = (200,000 / 200,000) = 1. The recordable rate would be reported as a 1 for the calendar year 2015.

Another example of a common rate found within safety is the Experience Modification Rate (EMR). This marvel of mathematical ingenuity is the product of a business's past safety performance as it relates to workmen's compensation rates (payouts) and its comparison to similar businesses in the State of Incorporation and adjusted for size. Basically, the amount paid out over the past three out of four years are compared to similar sized related businesses (restaurants are compared with restaurants; construction companies compared with construction companies). The numbers that come out of this equation (dumbed down in this article to relieve boredom) is a number that is less than, equal to, or greater than 1. For example, let's...