Safety programs are quite diverse – about as diverse as the industries in which safety standards, protocols and programs are instituted. And how effective each safety program seems to also vary according to the inherent risks of the industry and work site, as well as the language and cultural barriers of the various employees and the overall investment in safety from the C-suite.

[Image courtesy of EladeManu from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Safety equipment is just one part of a company’s “safety maturity.” This can now be measured and compared thanks to the Safety Maturity Index.

Many companies, however, tend to look at safety as something in the background, something foundational to set up the company’s overall success – it’s not usually something by which companies compare themselves with their competition. That is usually measured by revenue, stock price and growth rates. But now, thanks to the work at Rockwell Automation, there is a tool that can help companies not only compare their safety programs with each other, but also assess  their own “safety maturity.”

The tool is called the Safety Maturity Index, and it’s an online assessment where companies reveal demographic information and answer 15 questions related to three “critical elements” in any safety program – culture, compliance and capital.  Based on the demographics and the answers to the questions, an SMI for a company is developed on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 meaning the most rudimentary safety program or none at all, while 4 means a company considers safety a symbol of a superior operation and  emphasizes safety through the entire supply and production chain. The SMI is actually four scores – one overall and one each for the three elements of culture, compliance and capital.

The idea behind the SMI is to help companies know the strengths and weaknesses in their safety programs, and thus be able to assess  the best places to target limited resources for improvement or excellence. According to Mark Fitzman of Rockwell Automation, “The function of the tool is to give a company an understanding or baseline of where (it) stands in each of the three C’s. Many companies stop at SMI 3, thinking that they’ve arrived at the end of the safety journey.”

The demographic info collected by Rockwell Automation will help create a database so companies can compare themselves with peer companies of similar demographics. This information could also be used by companies in recruitment of new workers – those with higher SMI scores can tout they are concerned about worker safety and its importance in its culture.

You can check out the SMI tool at this link.