A data-driven approach to creating a culture of safety

Safety inspections and risk assessments require the right data to ensure that you’re focusing on the right issues.

As with any modern approach to process improvement, safety inspections and risk assessments require the right data to ensure that you’re focusing on the right issues, getting things done efficiently, and wringing the maximum value from your inspection processes. Fortunately, people engaged in safety programs (inspections and risk assessments, hazard reporting, remediation) are constantly generating data that’s really valuable at creating a data-driven approach to safety. (Unfortunately, capturing it on paper locks that data up, or requires a separate and error-prone transcription step.)

They may not even think of themselves as capturing data, so it’s important to convert their actions (inspecting, remediating, etc.) into data-driven insights (key performance indicators, performance metrics, safety metrics, and so on) that can be used by everyone to understand the value of safety. Creating and publishing those metrics can get everyone involved — even people without “safety” in their titles — so that hazard reporting and other activities become second nature, and great safety results become a source of pride.