What useful metrics can be used for measuring your organisation's safety management performance? Here we reveal some useful tips.

You can look at your organisation's Accident Book to determine how many accidents there have been over a specified time period. You could break them down by severity type, such as whether they were reportable under RIDDOR or simply a minor injury. You could compare this data to the UK statistics from the HSE website, to determine the accident rate denominated by employee count, to establish whether your performance is above or below average. You may also be able to obtain industry specific data from the HSE to make the same comparison. But this data, by its very nature, is already out of date. You should look for metrics which give information in real time, so what could they be?

A metric which looks at the reviewing frequency of important documents such as Risk Assessments, Safe Working Instructions etc. can quickly establish whether a system has become a paper mountain destined to collect dust on the top shelf in the Safety Manager's office. Each important document should have a specified maximum review cycle. If it is not reviewed within that time period then this should raise concern.

Risk assessment is the key to proactive Safety Management. Each risk assessment should determine whether existing controls are adequate. A good metric is the number of risk assessments with inadequate controls.

With sophisticated Risk Assessment methodology, it is possible to compare your actual accident statistics against perceived values calculated from your risk assessments. If your actual values exceed your calculated perceived values it suggests that your perception of risk is lower than identified in your risk assessments, which should raise concern.

You should know what safety legislation is relevant to your organisation and have a list to identify that which is relevant. It is good practice to update this list from time to time, so you will need to know the new or amended legislation. An audit review of the list will quickly identify whether new or amended legislation is, as a minimum, being identified. A good metric therefore is the number of legislative items not considered.

Training requirements, especially where refresher training might be required, can easily be overlooked. A metric which identifies the number of training requirements not fulfilled will give a good indication of the level of Safety Management.

You may have an Action Plan, Management Programme, list of "Things to do", name it how you wish. How many items are behind schedule? A good metric is the number of tasks/improvement actions behind schedule or late.

The ISO123 web based Management System constantly monitors all these metrics and more, so you will have an automatic and concise summary of your health & safety management performance, whenever you want.