As 2023 draws to an end, businesses across this great nation will be tallying their injury rates for bragging rights compared to other business locations, competitors, etc. It is a 50+ year tradition for many of these businesses. However, I wonder if this tradition would continue if they genuinely understood how flawed their calculation is. Far too many businesses can not explain the formula used to calculate their rate(s) or how it is flawed when the location has fewer than 100 full-time employees.
The 200,000 multiplier in the formula represents the number of hours 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year would work, and provides the standard base for calculating the incidence rate for an entire year.
So, for small businesses or small locations within large businesses, this formula can result in some serious misunderstandings about the true safety performance at the location. But every year, I see some clients listing their locations from best to worst based solely on this TRIR. I have seen firsthand the #1 facility and the last place facility and can say without a doubt – that the last place facility has more going on in terms of real safety than the #1 place finisher. But the first-place finisher is the largest facility in the business, and this location has all the “Low-Risk” support functions such as sales, marketing, finance, and executives (and all their support roles).
When I was a safety manager at my locations, I never got that kind of “padding” of my numbers, but I always got the speech about how I needed to perform at the level of the #1 location!
As a profession and in terms of measuring safety for executives, we must move beyond the TRIR. Our friends at the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) have done an excellent job of demonstrating how flawed the TRIR is. I encourage you to watch their 1-hour video and then use their 30-minute video to begin laying the groundwork with your executives so that we can move away from the TRIR.
https://safetyapp.shinyapps.io/trir_calculator_new/
For more details, refer to the paper: The Statistical Invalidity of TRIR as a Measure of Safety Performance (Hallowell et al. 2021)
NOTE: the TRIR was invented by OSHA so they could look at entire Industry Sectors! It was NEVER intended to be used by single businesses and certainly not intended to be used by locations within a single business. However, once OSHA announced their inspection plans would be based on TRIR and DART, executives adopted these metrics to gauge their “OSHA inspection risks.” And we can all guess what happened to incident reporting when the executives began issuing safety goals based on these rates – it simply dried up.
