It seems these signs have grown horns and arisen from hell! We have all seen them, and most of us have had them in our workplaces from time to time. But are they evil? Are they an accurate indicator of injury data manipulation?
Celebrating our successes in safety is IMPORTANT, and there is no better metric to celebrate than an actual reduction in injuries to our team members. However, we must be consistent in how we have achieved these lagging milestones! In other words…
Are we celebrating the product our Safety Management System/Process produced or are we simply celebrating the result(s) without fully understanding how they were achieved?
We MUST NEVER accept data manipulation to achieve a safety milestone – that erodes the SMS’s credibility and kills the culture. So we MUST be confident that incidents are being reported freely and that any incentives are based on the SMS functioning well and NOT SOLELY on end-results.
We need to celebrate the hard work that earned us this bragging right, and we should be CONFIDENT this achievement is a result of that hard work and be very PROUD of it. But any hint of manipulation in that lagging indicator number must be eradicated with swift and severe action, as it is an ethical breach in what management claims to be the most essential element of the business.
I always liked setting monthly incident reporting goals. And yes, this is almost always met with shock and criticism. I start with…
