Prime Contractor Safety Metrics

Safety metrics are a fundamental part of Environment Health Safety (EHS) reporting, as they offer insight into the effectiveness of safety programs and activities. These measurements are the guiding light to help you identify gaps and deficiencies in your safety program and improve your initiatives and processes going forward.  

As a Prime Contractor, the first thing you need to have reported by your foreman and subcontractors is how many people they have on the worksite first thing every morning. This is done so accurate headcounts can be done in case of an emergency.  

At the end of each workday, Subcontractors should submit the workers’ names and the hours they worked on the day. These have many uses, such as payroll and work accomplishment/productivity data. These numbers can also be used for reporting data like Total Recordable Incident Frequency (TRIF)

to the owners. 

Prime Contractors should request that a percentage of random Field Level Hazard Assessments (FLHA) be made available to them. These can be checked over for content, completeness, and worker review during the workday for changing or new hazards while also checking that the foreman is signing that they have reviewed them during the shift. Setting up a scoring system to help workers improve their hazard assessments is even possible. Reporting the number of FLHA’s completed every month is an excellent statistic to demonstrate hazard awareness and control to the owners. Still, if you score them, you can also help workers improve and show ownership of the improvement for the hazard assessment process.  

This can also work for evaluating Observations and Safe Work Permits if you have issues in those areas. 

Incidents (including near misses) and inspections should all be documented and reported to the Prime Contractor for collection and review for reporting to the owner. Incident, inspection, observation, safety, and pre-job meeting concerns must all be documented. Measuring each action item for what was done to address the concern, who was assigned to address the concern, when it was started, when it was expected to be completed, and when it was completed must all be documented. This demonstrates a positive safety attitude to the site owners but will help increase workers’ assistance in identifying work hazards when they see management addressing their concerns. 

Every organization member must be involved and actively participate in your EHS program to reduce incidents and reduce worker risk. This means every employee at every level needs to know what the company’s safety metric goals are so they can contribute appropriately.  

When measuring worker participation, a few key safety metrics to track each month include: 

• The number of safety meetings and pre-job meetings and how many people attended.
• The number of training courses completed.
• The number of inspections conducted and submitted.
• The number of closed-out corrective actions.

Many other things can be measured in Health, Safety, and Environment. Here are some examples: 

• Equipment Breakdowns
• Average Overtime Hours
• Worker Fitness Assessments
• Employee Perceptions of Managements Commitment to Safety, Survey.
• EHS Production Costs
• Percentage of Leadership Members Trained in Safety
• Number of Spills, Releases
• Clean-up costs
• Personal protective equipment costs
• Percentage of Productive Days
• Average Amount of Time to Resolve Issues

The number of things that can be measured is infinite. Selecting those items that will provide a return on your Health, Safety, or Environmental performance without costing a lot to collect and correct is needed. 

Measuring Leaderships’ contribution and participation in Health, Safety, and Environment programs and sharing those numbers with employees and hire ups is one of the best things a company can do. A commitment requires measurable action. “Walking the talk” is how People Leaders must commit to behaving a certain way that might kick-start their worker’s participation, but until you begin behaving in line with what you say, you are only talking.  

Commitment requires visible, observable behaviours. Setting up manageable and meaningful goals, creating checklists, making a contract with your boss or workers, and creating positive consequences for reaching milestones are fundamental components of a good action plan. People Leaders execute projects successfully because of action planning and consistent monitoring. 

Leaders must adopt a more collaborative approach, organizations that seek to involve both employees and management in jointly designing, rolling out, and maintaining a behavioural safety process as well as in analyzing the safety data to identify items that can be improved have the best statistics.