I am big on measuring. Those of you who know me know this. I am not one to assume that safety is in place and that safety protocols are working.

But too often, we will find ourselves falling into a trap – a trap of believing that our safety program is working just because we haven’t had an incident in three months, or an injury in six months or a death in two years.

[Image by Flickr user EladeManu via a Creative Commons license]A recent article in Professional Safety magazine reminds us that we have to check our thinking about safety and back it up with measurable facts, like ensuring that 100 percent of workers who require headwear on the floor are actually wearing it – and not just talking about the written rule that mandates such headwear. Understanding the difference between theory and practice is vital.

Those of us who know anything about workplace safety (which of course is all of you since you read this blog semi-faithfully) know that effectiveness cannot be entirely measured by end results or non-results. If there is not a way to measure effectiveness of the safety program otherthan by end results, then you could be looking at good luck that is keeping your incidents and injuries from happening.

Now, of course, with human nature being what it is, there is usually some luck involved in a company achieving a zero-injury record for a year or several months. We all know that even the best safety programs won’t prevent every injury. But with the goal being to mitigate preventable injuries, to not have some measurement in place to determine that the injury-mitigation protocols are in place and are actually effective will just mean you are playing Russian roulette every time you set foot on the work floor.

Burk and Hendry remind us about our thinking. We can’t just measure effectiveness of our protocols simply by the end results; we have to actually have measurable intelligence  through each stage of our protocols so we know exactly where we stand, where weak spots are and how we can best address them so our belief in safety is replaced by actual, measurable confidence.

In other words, it is one thing to say, “We are a safe company because we have not had a serious injury on our floor for the last 12 months.” It is another thing to say, “We are a saf company because we quickly put up confined-space safety signs in 100 percent of our plants and improved our safety-test scores among workers by 20 percent.”

In other words, it’s about measurables. It’s about being able to note your safety protocols in action, in real time, and to see how well they are functioning, where there are gaps and how to quickly address them before an incident occurs.

As many protocols have several steps (including the proper way to do a task), a good safety program is not relying on positive thinking, but it relies upon measurables that show the effectiveness of every step in the protocol, not just the end result.

I will jump off from here and dedicate future posts on a breakdown of Burk and Hendry’s article,which discusses how to implement measurables in your safety protocol and how to determine the effectiveness of the training based on the revelations of the measurables.

If you do not have thse kinds of measurable s within your protocol currently, they are relatively easy to plug in, and if you do have them, this article can help you use those tools effectively to determine the overall safety of your floor.

Let’s take this journey together.