Safety analytics is an emerging science that is helping to drive improvements not only in workforce safety and health programs, but also in overall business performance. Deloitte Consulting, a leading practitioner in this field, defines safety analytics as “the science of studying the underlying causes of and contributing factors to workplace accidents.”
On the surface, that may sound similar to what top workforce safety and health professionals have done all along. But what’s new is the amount and range of data that can be analyzed. For example, part of what distinguishes safety analytics from past practices is the use of external data (demographics, lifestyle indicators, industry financial data, etc.), as well as traditional historical and observed data. Among other benefits, this approach helps to ensure that human variables are appropriately weighted in identifying risk and taking appropriate preventive actions.
Combined with the growing use of leading indicators, leveraging safety analytics gives you a more complete, and more current, picture of everything from specific work processes and locations up to the health of your safety culture in general. This, in turn, leads to a more targeted, proactive allocation of available resources for:
Its power is fundamentally predictive - on the most basic level, the tools and methods of this science help workforce safety and health professionals to more quickly and more accurately identify the jobs, processes, locations, groups of individuals, conditions and so on that represent the most immediate, severe or costly risks.
For example, one tool that is especially powerful with safety analytics is a Risk Severity Index (RSI) - a formula incorporating weighted variables like expected frequency of an unsafe behavior, nature/ severity of injury/loss if uncorrected, number of people potentially affected, and more. Such an index, tailored to your specific workplace, provides a consistent, objective guide for prioritizing the most urgent safety and health risks that need to be addressed. Resources - and especially time - are always limited, and an RSI helps ensure that training and other preventive measures are directed where they’ll have the most impact. Clearly, if a process has a high probability of unsafe incidents and such incidents could shut down production or lead to severe injury, that merits greater attention than processes that rarely go awry and have minimal consequences.
Some of these distinctions may be obvious in a given industry or workplace, but others are more subtle - though no less costly - and are rarely caught until after an incident occurs. By focusing more attention on leading indicators rather than relying primarily on lagging indicators, safety analytics helps you make these critical distinctions before incidents occur.