As we enter into a fresh new year, it’s a great time for personal and professional renewal. While you may be looking forward to more gym time to keep yourself healthy, it’s also a great idea to recommit to tracking vital data to keep your crew healthy and safe too.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 20% of fatal accidents occurred in the construction industry. The most common source of those is OSHA’s Fatal Four – falls, struck-by, electrocutions, and caught-in or –between incidents. Injuries, illnesses and fatalities are on the rise, but the start of a new year is a great time to review your data and pull some new tricks out of your sleeve.
That’s right, we’re talking about using Key Performance Indicators to continually improve your safety program. In this blog post, we’ll go over what KPIs are, four areas we see the highest impact, and how you can use data to keep your crew safe.
KPIs and SMART Guidelines
First, a quick refresher – KPIs are quantifiable data points and metrics used to identify progress over time towards a goal. KPIs can be short or long-term, but we’d strongly recommend having a combination of both for your safety program. Like we mentioned, keeping your KPIs quantifiable and relevant is essential – you don’t need to keep an eye on types of music played or what everyone had for lunch. However, it is a good idea to track incidents, money spent, or training sessions. More on these later!
SMART KPIs
As you’re thinking through essential KPIs for your program, keep in mind SMART. Here’s what each part of this acronym means.
- Specific: The KPI should be clear and direct in how they reach the goal. Think about number of observations submitted – that metric can be used as an engagement KPI.
- Measurable: You should be able to quantify the metric you’re tracking, like the types and frequency of hazards.
- Achievable: You should be able to set and reach a realistic goal with your KPI. Try to pick goals for simple things that can or will happen on the job site.
- Relevant: The KPI should be something that matters to your safety program. No need to track sales, new contracts or other business-related goals here. Just strictly safety!
- Timely: Your KPIs should be achievable within a set timeframe. Monthly, quarterly and yearly goals are a good place to start.
Taking time to set SMART KPIs can help you stay successful in the long run.
Why Should You Track KPIs?
Keep in mind that safety is an ongoing process. You won’t get instant results overnight. While you should respond to observations as they come in, the bigger picture will require a few months of consistent reporting to get actionable results.
By monitoring your KPIs and acting based on the results, you can establish a cycle of continuous improvement. Do you see a lot of slip hazards come in through observations? Train your crew to keep job sites clean. Are you spending money on PPE or tools that wear down quickly? Show everyone how to properly care for their equipment.
Continuous Improvement isn’t about making massive swings at big issues – it’s all about small, effective refinements that lead towards your safety goals. You don’t necessarily need to make your systems more complicated – making those small adjustments and determining their effectiveness can make a major difference over time.
KPIs Safety Pros Should Be Tracking in 2025
If you’re not already tracking KPIs as part of your regular operations (It’s ok, things happen!), take the time this new year to get on top of things. Here are our four recommended KPIs for all new or experienced safety managers.
- Lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR): This long-term KPI measures the number of injuries that result in lost work time per million hours worked.
- Total recordable incident rate (TRIR): Measures an organization’s overall health and safety performance, including all work-related incidents.
- Near misses: This metric shows hazards present on the job site, allowing you to predict and prevent incidents, injuries, and deaths.
- Average overtime hours: This shows hazards present on the job site, allowing you to predict and prevent incidents, injuries, and deaths.
Overall, these KPIs can help track how injuries, fatigue and safety engagement affect your organization. As you collect data, make sure to keep an eye on it using a data dashboard or regular reporting. Monitoring results can help you figure out if you’re moving towards your goals.
If you’re not seeing the results you want, make sure to take time and adjust your safety program to better support your goals. Continuously improving your processes and procedures leads to a safer workplace with fewer accidents, greater engagement and stronger safety culture.
What other safety metrics should I track?
Great question! Any quantifiable activity or occurrence on a job site can be measured as a KPI. Here are a few other metrics you could consider tracking.
- Employee training: Tracks training completion rates, refresher courses, and assessment scores. This can help track both accountability and capability. OSHA also requires organizations to keep records of training!
- Corrective actions: Measures an organization’s actions to address health and safety risks. This shows you’re doing your due diligence to address hazards and accidents. It can also indicate how well you’re preventing them in the first place.
- Employee surveys: This metric can reveal how well employees understand workplace safety, which can help prevent incidents. You could also gather emotional sentiment, helpful criticism, and other data that can be used to improve safety.
- Safety prevention costs: Measures the monetary costs of health and safety prevention efforts. This can indicate the efficiency of your efforts and help you properly calculate the return on investment, which can play an important part in getting leadership buy-in.
Track KPIs with Safety Mojo
Keeping track of KPIs without a powerful data dashboard can be difficult, to say the least. That’s why it’s crucial to pick a tool or software to handle day-to-day data analysis. Leveraging Safety Mojo Dashboards can help you get the most out of your KPIs – here’s how.
- Automatically digest and organize data in real-time – no manual work required.
- Filter your data using just your voice-powered AI.
- Build in-depth reports quickly using AI – perfect for reporting KPIs!
Ready to get started? Visit our Dashboards page to see how Safety Mojo makes setting and tracking KPIs a breeze.
