Importance of rating system to evaluate safety performance

Discover how safety audit and rating systems can enhance organizational safety performance. Learn to quantify safety elements, set clear KPIs, and drive continuous improvement in workplace safety and productivity.

August 1, 2024

Author: Anup Meharaul, Manager Corporate Safety

Construction, EHS, health safety, Safety Audits, Safety Hazards, safety management

Safety Management is an integral part of all activities and is a continuous process. A good safety culture enhances productivity. To achieve this, organizations create and maintain the Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OHSMS).

In order to create continual improvement, the effectiveness of the OHSMS needs to be measured, gaps identified, and improvement action taken. Conducting periodic audits of the OHSMS is one method of achieving this. Some organizations track statistics of safety performance such as accident frequency rate, severity rate and incident rate to know focus their improvement efforts. However, these lagging indicators are not the best measures of the effectiveness of the OHSMS system.

Introducing Safety Rating System

In this context, using a rating system to evaluate the effectiveness of OHSMS offers some unique advantages. We at Gem Engserv have developed a comprehensive “Rating System” of OHSMS performance. This article focuses on the construction of the rating system and its advantages.

The rating system breaks down all aspects of OHSMS into distinct groups such as (1) planning, (2) implementation and (3) end-result. A series of parameters covering different action points in each group is assigned weightages and safety ratings are generated by an auditor for each item. By the time the audit is completed, a safety rating on each of these groups as well as a combined rating is generated. An attempt has been made to develop as many objective and evidence based parameters as possible. Higher weightage is assigned to those parameters that have a direct and immediate impact on safety on the project site.

Common Critique - Is Safety just a numbers game?

An important aspect of any measurement system is its validity. We have come across criticism of various rating systems and one common amongst all criticism is that the rating / score thrown up by the scheme does not match with the subjective opinion of those who have a first-hand experience and reliable assessment of the status of the aspect being assessed.

Control Mechanisms for theory-practice fit

In order to guard against this drawback, we ran pilot checks of the rating system. Our expert safety auditor was asked to provide a subjective assessment of the site being audited and was then asked to fill out the score sheet. To our pleasant surprise, the overall safety score was pretty close to the intuitive and subjective assessment. Then we ran the system across a few different sites and compared the outcome of the rating system with the subjective assessment. In all cases, we found that the safety score realistically represents the level of OHSMS performance of the sites.

Advantages of a robust Safety Rating System

It provides a high-level summary of the overall performance, a three-digit executive summary if you may call it!
The constituent scores of the rating (planning, implementation, end-result) automatically point towards the area that needs immediate attention.
It can be used to set safety KRA & KPI at all levels of operations and management. Employee KRA / KPI associated with Health & Safety can be given numerical targets for better system understanding and safe production. Safety ratings system may define organizational safety goals of future. The numerical safety targets can be increased every year as continual improvement.
By tracking changes in the safety scores, effectiveness of any improvement initiative can be objectively assessed.
The safety performance of different sites of the same organization can be compared and a healthy competition introduced.
By comparing safety scores of other organizations / sites, realistic benchmarks can be established, and teams can be motivated to match the competitors.
By rating planning, implementation and statistics, a healthy mix of leading and lagging indicators is created. This provides an insight whether a good or poor outcome is due to good or bad luck or is underpinned by proper planning and implementation. Poor outcome scores coupled with high implementation scores may point to either fabrication of records or mechanical generation of paper evidence without implemention of the system in spirit. Such insights are not easy to obtain from conventional audits.
Instead of a compliant vs non-compliant reporting, which is standard on audits, the rating system provides a mechanism to provide graded feedback. Most of the time, the reality is neither white nor black, but a shade of grey. That is often more acceptable to the auditee and auditee organization, thereby increasing the chance of acceptance of the report and receiving a better response to it.
Anyone interested in finding more specific information for improvement can always dive deep into the breakup of the rating system and pinpoint the parameters to be addressed. This makes up for another criticism of typical rating systems viz they try to convert everything into one number thereby missing the gist!

Conclusion

The safety rating is a tool to measure the level of a system implemented on ground. If thoughtfully developed, it provides clarity on areas of improvement and project safety performance and at the same time provide top management with one or two numbers to form an assessment of the reality!