9 Benefits Of A Scorecard In Safety (Plus Definition)

Many businesses want to improve their safety performance to ensure the health and well-being of their employees. Safety scorecards are one way that a company can track its progress on safety performance to meet its long-term objectives. If you’re part of a company’s safety team, you can use a safety scorecard to help an organization achieve its safety goals and create a healthy environment for all employees. In this article, we explain what a safety scorecard is and provide a list of nine benefits of a scorecard in safety performance.

What is a safety scorecard?

A safety scorecard is a set of metrics that provides insight to help an organization understand its safety performance. Safety teams and company leaders can analyze a scorecard to determine safety trends and identify areas for improvement. By highlighting multiple metrics related to safety, scorecards can provide helpful feedback for organizations on ways to improve the health, safety, and wellness of their employees. It can also help businesses track their safety outcomes and predict future trends in their safety performance. Here are some of the common metrics that businesses can track using a safety scorecard:

• Safety training: This metric shows an organization’s total number of safety training hours per employee.

• Site inspections: This figure includes both the number of planned inspections at a worksite and the number of actual inspections that occur at a worksite.

• Safety audits: This benchmark measures the results of a company’s safety audits, which collect information about an organization’s health and safety initiatives.

• Overtime hours: This figure measures the number of hours that employees work beyond their normal scheduled hours each week.

• Incident rates: This rate shows the number of incidents, including workplace accidents and injuries, that occur each week.

• Near misses: This metric shows the number of times an incident could have happened, but no actual damage or injury occurred.

• Lost time incident rates: This statistic calculates the number of incidents that result in employees being unable to work.

• Employee surveys: This metric provides information about employees’ perception of an organization’s safety performance based on regular surveys.

9 benefits of a scorecard in safety

Here are some of the common benefits of using a scorecard to measure the safety performance in your organization:

1. Summarizing key data

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. By summarizing key safety information and sharing it with employees, businesses can also help to promote transparency about safety objectives across the organization.

2. Improving health and safety outcomes

Tracking safety data and updating this information on the safety scorecard can help to improve an organization’s health and safety outcomes. Studying the data on a scorecard over time can help safety teams and managers understand patterns in the data and identify the main reasons for those trends. For example, safety teams analyzing a scorecard may learn that more incidents typically occur in the workplace after a piece of equipment malfunctions. Based on this information, teams may recommend implementing more regular equipment inspections to keep incident rates low and improve safety outcomes for the organization.

3. Communicating the importance of safety

Having a safety scorecard can help organizations communicate the importance of workplace safety to their employees. Many businesses choose to share the safety scorecard results with employees regularly to help them understand how the company is progressing toward its safety goals. Communicating this information with everyone in an organization can help teams promote safety awareness and encourage every employee to do their part to create a safe and healthy work environment.

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4. Customizing with new data

A safety scorecard is an evolving document that safety teams or managers can continue to customize to meet key safety objectives. For example, after maintaining a safety scorecard for several months, teams may discover that it could be beneficial to include information about near misses, even though these events may have little or no impact on the organization’s incident or lost-time rates. It’s usually simple for teams to add new information to the safety scorecard that can help them gain a broad perspective of the company’s safety performance.

5. Creating an operational strategy

Keeping a safety scorecard can help businesses create and monitor an operational strategy to improve their performance metrics. Safety teams and managers can study the comprehensive data on a scorecard to make recommendations about the company’s safety operations. For example, based on the results of a safety scorecard, safety teams may suggest that a company make safety training a monthly activity for all employees, regardless of their job titles. These types of strategies can help businesses make safety a priority for employees in the organization.

6. Identifying safety trends

Safety scorecards can help businesses identify trends in their safety performance. Understanding these trends can help safety teams identify areas where the organization excels in safety-related measures and areas where they can improve. When teams have this information, they can make suggestions about ways to improve an organization’s methods to meet its long-term objectives. For example, teams reviewing a safety scorecard may find the business has higher safety performance metrics after a safety audit, and they may recommend doing more audits to sustain those performance levels.

7. Promoting early detection

Maintaining an updated safety scorecard can help businesses detect early changes in an organization’s safety metrics. Tracking these changes early can help teams identify ways to address the changes before they become a problem. For example, teams may see an increase in a company’s lost time incident rate over several weeks, which can allow them to devise strategies to lower that rate before it increases any further. Identifying these changes early can help businesses continue to operate safely and effectively.

8. Increasing employee satisfaction

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. 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. Improving areas such as culture and engagement can help increase employees’ satisfaction with their jobs.

9. Making continual progress

A safety scorecard provides businesses with a comprehensive way to measure their progress in safety-related initiatives. Reviewing the scorecard regularly can help safety teams and managers understand the areas where a business can continue making improvements to reach its safety goals. Making these improvements continually can help businesses communicate a clear, consistent message about the importance of safety to their employees and encourage everyone in an organization to keep working toward the organization’s long-term safety goals.

I hope you find this article helpful.