A safety scorecard is an invaluable tool for any business looking to improve workplace safety. By tracking key safety metrics and indicators, a scorecard provides visibility into the effectiveness of safety programs and processes. Implementing a safety scorecard can lead to a wide range of benefits for your business.
What is a Safety Scorecard?
A safety scorecard is a simple data tracking system used to monitor important safety performance metrics over time. It provides a snapshot of safety at a glance. Typical safety scorecards track 6-12 key metrics on a regular basis, such as monthly or quarterly.
Safety scorecards allow you to establish safety performance goals and track progress towards meeting those goals. The act of routinely reviewing the scorecard focuses management’s attention on safety and reinforces accountability across the organization.
Why Use a Safety Scorecard?
There are many excellent reasons for businesses to implement safety scorecards:
Improved Safety Culture
A safety scorecard reinforces the importance of safety as a core company value. Establishing and reviewing safety goals motivates employees and managers to prioritize safety initiatives.
Increased Visibility
With clear metrics and routine reviews it becomes much easier to identify trends and catch issues early. A scorecard provides visibility into safety performance across the organization.
Better Decision Making
Data-driven decision making leads to impactful safety investments. Understanding which safety indicators are lagging allows you to target resources to the areas of greatest need.
Enhanced Accountability
When managers and employees know their safety activities will be measured and reviewed, they become more accountable for ensuring procedures are followed.
Reduced Incidents
Several studies have shown that companies who track leading safety indicators through a scorecard have less incidents and injuries. Focusing on proactive metrics prevents accidents.
Improved Compliance
Scorecards often incorporate compliance metrics like training completion rates. This motivates supervisors to stay on top of regulatory requirements.
Benchmarking
Safety scorecards facilitate benchmarking against industry averages and your own historical performance. You can set goals based on best practice standards.
Key Elements of an Effective Safety Scorecard
While safety scorecards can take many forms, the most effective scorecards have these essential elements:
Leading metrics
Scorecards should focus on leading indicators that drive performance, rather than lagging indicators like past incidents. Leading metrics include training rates, inspection frequency, safe observations submitted, etc.
Limited number of metrics
Tracking too many metrics leads to scattered focus. Prioritize the 6-12 most important metrics that will drive improvement.
Scorecard owner
Assign an owner responsible for assembling data and distributing the scorecard each period.
Routine cadence
Set a regular schedule for publishing the scorecard, such as monthly or quarterly. Timely data is most impactful.
Goals
Set benchmark goals to motivate continuous improvement for each metric. Compare performance to goals.
Simplicity
The scorecard should be easy to update and interpret at a glance. Complicated scorecards won’t be maintained.
Action planning
Provide space to document actions when goals are missed. The scorecard loses effectiveness without follow up plans.
10 Recommended Safety Metrics for Scorecards
The following 10 leading indicator metrics are commonly included on safety scorecards:
- Safety training completion rate
- Percentage of inspections completed on schedule
- Number of employee safety suggestions submitted
- Number of employee safety observations submitted
- Number of near miss reports submitted
- Number of safety meetings held
- Number of job safety analyses completed
- Percentage of action items closed on time
- Employee participation in safety culture survey
- Completion rate for safety orientations
Of course, your business may require a different set of metrics based on your operations and industry. The important thing is choosing metrics you can influence that will drive overall safety performance improvement.
Getting Started with a Safety Scorecard
Implementing a new safety scorecard requires a systematic approach:
Define goals
Start by identifying your overall safety goals and priorities for improvement. This guides which metrics you’ll select.
Choose metrics
Pick 6-12 leading indicator metrics aligned to your goals that can be reasonably measured regularly.
Determine process
Outline the process of how metrics will be collected and reviewed across the business each period.
Create template
Build a simple, easy to update scorecard template to maintain consistency.
Communicate launch
Inform all involved managers and employees about the new scorecard and review process.
Implement and review
Roll out the safety scorecard, then review and refine as needed after the first few cycles.
Real-World Examples
To see how an effective safety scorecard comes to life, here are two examples:
Construction Safety Scorecard
This construction firm tracks leading indicators like inspections, training, and observations that indicate how safely crews are working. Comparing to goals quickly shows where more focus is needed.
Manufacturing Safety Scorecard
For this manufacturer, metrics emphasize hazardous condition reporting, safe equipment use, and near miss submissions to prevent incidents. Action items ensure accountability.
Continuously Improve Your Scorecard
View your safety scorecard as a dynamic tool that will evolve over time. As your safety culture matures, you may find certain metrics are no longer relevant or new metrics should be added. Regularly review and update your scorecard to drive ongoing safety gains.
The most successful safety scorecards act as the North Star guiding your organization’s safety program. By establishing a focused set of metrics and reviewing them routinely, you keep safety top of mind across your company. The visibility a scorecard provides into safety performance is invaluable.
If you don’t have the resources to build out a scorecard internally, consider partnering with a safety consultant. Their expertise can help you implement an effective safety scorecard tailored to your organization. Investing in a safety scorecard will pay dividends through better safety outcomes.
Safety scorecard excel templates
The most traditionally relied upon safety scorecard template has been the excel template.
Many companies use excel and spreadsheet based templates to create and manage their safety scorecard.
There are many benefits to this approach, including the fact that almost everyone has excel and its really easy to pick and put some data in.
The major downside to an excel safety scorecard template is maintaining it over time. Because your excel based template wont be connected to the safety data being pulled in from the field, someone (maybe you) will have to compile and reconcile all of that data and then put it into a spreadsheet.
This can become extremely monotonous, especially when looking to update your safety scorecard regularly or when working on a project with hundreds of disparate documents.
What is a safety scorecard?
A safety scorecard is a combination of safety metrics displayed in a digestible format which can be viewed and analysed to understand safety performance. The purpose of this scorecard is to spot trends, issues and opportunities for improvement, and use that data to make more informed decisions about exactly how to improve.
For many companies, the safety scorecard serves as the source of truth for safety resourcing and strategy.
Almost all companies have struggled to measure and track safety performance in a consistent and accurate manner. And this has made it really difficult for companies to make improvements to their safety plans and safety management system.
While some improvements were no brainers, others are less obvious, and a lack of good and reliable data has stifled a lot of innovation and improvement in this area of work.
The safety scorecard, while not perfect, has often resulted in a more comprehensive and balanced analysis (hence the balanced safety scorecard). Instead of measuring safety performance based on a single KPI like total recordable injury rate (here are a bunch of KPIs), the safety scorecard creates a more holistic approach to understanding organisational or project safety.
Balanced Scorecard in 2 Minutes
How can safety scorecards improve employee performance?
By using safety scorecards, many businesses can take steps toward improving their overall safety performance and creating a positive, healthy culture for employees. Safety scorecards can help reduce employee absenteeism, which is the absence of work for an unplanned reason, such as illness.
Why is a safety scorecard important?
Using a safety scorecard can help companies gather and summarize key safety information. Many businesses keep their safety scorecards at a centralized location or in an accessible database to allow various members of the organization, such as the safety team, to view this information at any time.
How can safety scorecards help reduce employee absenteeism?
Safety scorecards can help reduce employee absenteeism, which is the absence of work for an unplanned reason, such as illness. These scorecards can also encourage employees to participate in an organization’s progress toward its safety goals, which can increase their engagement levels at work.
What indicators are displayed on a safety scorecard?
In the safety scorecard example below, the indicator being displayed is the number and type of accidents. You can see the number and frequency of accidents is displayed in the top section, and the bottom section features the type of accident.
