Rethinking Safety Performance Metrics in the Utility Industry

Rethinking Safety Performance Metrics in the Utility Industry

When it comes to measuring safety performance in the utility industry, there are many long-held beliefs, including the ideas that safety performance ought to be measured through leading and lagging indicators, that metrics support improvement through the “what gets measured, gets done” philosophy, and that if metrics are moving the right way, the company is getting safer. But, what if all those long held beliefs have flaws, or, at least, limitations?

The re-thinking of traditional approaches to safety performance and metrics is reflected in the increasing number of articles challenging the Heinrich Safety Pyramid. Many of us were trained in the concepts behind the safety pyramid and the idea that working on near-misses and minor injuries would reduce the number of incidents, shrink the pyramid, and decrease the number of fatalities. The problem? Current data shows that it’s not working. While the utility industry is reducing the bottom of the pyramid (the minor injuries), the number of fatalities is increasing – we’re currently experiencing one of the highest fatality rates ever at 19.2 per 100,000 workers per the US Dept. of Labor Bureau and Statistics.

We believe no industry can be described with one safety pyramid, because industrial operations are a compilation of many different activities with different safety pyramids. For instance, some activities, like stuffing envelopes, bring with it the risk of very minor injuries (a paper cut), but no number of paper cuts will ever give rise to a fatality. On the other end of the spectrum, some activities, like launching astronauts into space, will either go perfectly or, in the event of a problem, experience a high probability of fatalities. Every industry has activities where the safety pyramid is wide and not very tall, and other activities where the pyramid is tall and skinny. As a result, it’s illogical for an organization, like NASA, to think that by tracking minor injuries (first-aid visits requiring band-aids) they will make space flight safer.

For the foreseeable future, heavy industry is going to look at traditional safety metrics, like medical aids or lost-time incident frequency, even though not all incidents are created equally. Setting aside the metrics for a minute, at a human level, an employee experiencing an electrical switching incident is different than an employee who engages in manual labor one day and wakes up the next day with a sore shoulder. As people who manage our own weekend-warrior aches we know these events are not the same, even though both show up as an incident ending the “incident-free days” record. When it comes to the question of which business is safer, most of us would not be bothered about working in a company where the nature of injuries amounted to occasional over-exertion. We would be cautious and more diligent working in operations that posed greater risks.

At the same time, having a “target zero” injury philosophy feels compelling to many. It’s aspirational and suggests we are putting “safety first”. But what does a low incident rate really tell us? Many of us will remember the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 which killed 11, injured 17, and resulted in one of the largest oil spills in history. What fewer people know is that managers from BP and Transocean (the rig operators) were on the rig the day of the disaster to celebrate 7 years of injury free safety performance. That’s compelling.

Real safety performance requires a variety of approaches, and low lost-time injury rates alone cannot be counted on to be a good indicator of how safe a company is. We believe it’s fair to suggest that poor safety incident rates do show that a company has a problem, but the converse is not true. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, low worker injury rates did not mean the operation was safe.

Part of the apparent disconnect between traditional safety stats and holistic safety performance comes from the way in which some companies manage safety statistics, such as aggressively using light duty programs to alter the perception of safety performance and metrics. However, we believe the bigger issue is that being safe at the macro level and being safe at the micro level are very different.

Very Different Safety Programs

A growing number of companies are increasing their focus on Serious Injury & Fatality (SIF) prevention programs. These programs recognize the difference between a recordable injury, like a sore muscle, and a near-miss, resulting in no injury but one which could have killed somebody, if not for a little good luck. This trend is viewed very positively by many as it lines up with our natural view of focusing on what’s really important. However, we suggest that many still feel conflicted – on one hand, it’s acceptable to say SIF incidents require more attention, but it’s a bit taboo to describe any injury as no