Workplace injuries and illnesses significantly impact an organisation’s overall health. Incidents affect a company’s reputation, its ability to secure future work and bring a heavy emotional toll that can negatively impact employee morale and wellbeing. With so much riding on an organisation’s environment, health and safety (EHS) performance, it’s clear why some companies want to lower their injury and incident rates. But how can a company know how they stack up against their peers? This article explores how to better understand an organisation by effectively measuring its safety performance against industry peers.
Incident rates serve as key indicators of an organisation’s safety performance. These rates provide insights into the frequency of workplace injuries and illnesses relative to the total hours worked. By understanding these numbers, organisations can identify areas of concern and take appropriate action.
Safe Work Australia provides valuable data and a calculator you can use to find out your businesses lost time injury frequency rates (per industry) and lost time injuries in the financial year.
Benchmarking involves comparing an organisation’s incident rates with those of its industry peers. It provides a clearer picture of how the organisation is performing in terms of safety. However, it’s crucial to ensure comparisons are made with industry-specific data. Comparing against dissimilar industries could provide misleading conclusions due to differences in operational environments and associated risks.
Safe Work Australia’s data and research tools, such as the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) calculator, helps companies to benchmark their health and safety performance against industry standards.
According to Safe Work Australia’s latest statistics, the work-related injury rate in Australia is approximately 3.5%. Over the past decade, there have been significant improvements in workplace safety, yet challenges remain. For instance, in 2023, there were 200 worker fatalities, with a fatality rate of 1.4 deaths per 100,000 workers. The highest rates of serious claims were in industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing, transport, postal and warehousing and construction.
Once you know where your organisation stands, it’s essential to continuously monitor that standing and act on the information. If the results are good and your company is performing better than your peers, that’s great news but you must maintain that. On the other hand, if the results are not so good, a new approach to workplace safety is needed.
While most organisations already have the basics in place to improve workplace safety, many are not taking full advantage of their data and its powerful effect on workplace safety. With data analytics, companies can analyse injury and illness information to find trends and patterns that help identify common hazards and implement measures to prevent future injuries and illnesses. One of the best tools for this is EHS management software.
Understanding how your organisation’s safety performance compares against its peers is essential and a great motivator to get your safety program into shape. Companies serious about reducing their injury rates should consider implementing EHS management software that can process large volumes of data and identify patterns that might be difficult to spot otherwise.
The team at Ideagen Lucidity are ready to assist. Get in touch with us at contact.lucidity@ideagen.com or on 1800 595 241.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to provide general information on the subject matter. This is not intended as legal or expert advice for your specific situation. You should seek professional advice before acting or relying on the content of this information.