Five Keys to Impactful Safety Reporting

July 23, 2024

As a safety professional, it’s crucial to maintain a continuous focus on safety reporting. Effective and meaningful reports depend on systems implemented well beforehand that ensure your data lays a solid foundation. Let’s take a look at the five keys to making your safety reports as impactful as possible.

Are You Reporting Beyond the Basics?

Often, safety reports bring to mind regulatory reports, like OSHA logs.

However, impactful reporting goes beyond just incident and injury stats. Safety reporting should serve as an evidence-based method for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your program, utilizing quantifiable data as the backbone of your narrative.

When preparing safety reports, ensuring compliance with regulatory obligations is a primary concern. However, reports for consumers, key stakeholders, and management, including KPI and other reports for the leadership team, are equally important.

The data in your regulatory reports should inform these additional reports, maintaining both completeness and accuracy to ensure consistency across all reporting.

Ask yourself these five questions to ensure your safety reporting is as useful as possible:

Is Your Data Complete?

A common issue in safety reporting is missing data—whether that’s OSHA recordable information or other vital stats. Missing data can skew your analysis, leading to misrepresentation of your safety program’s true performance. To circumvent missing data, it’s essential to set up an organized structure for data collection. Identify all sources of data across locations and departments to ensure none are overlooked. Consider the breadth of incidents being reported and strive for a comprehensive data collection that covers all incident severities for a complete picture before analysis.

Is Your Data Accurate?

Accuracy in reporting both incidents (both accidents and near misses) is crucial. This involves ensuring incidents are neither over-reported nor under-reported, capturing sufficient detail in records, and accurately recording the nature, location, and events leading up to incidents.

Is Your Data Relevant?

Ensure your statistics are relevant to your business. Reflect on the specific performance-measurement goals and KPIs, such as Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART), safety observations, near misses, or training completion rates, set at the start of the year. Your reporting should directly speak to these goals and demonstrate your performance.

Does Your Reporting Summarize Your Results?

The aim of safety reporting is to narrate the story behind the stats. This includes comparing current results to previous years, identifying trends, evaluating against initial goals, and highlighting the program’s strengths and weaknesses. Celebrating key successes, such as safety awards or advances in the safety program, enhances the report’s value beyond mere statistics.

Is Your Reporting Actionable?

Your report should offer insights and guide future actions. Identifying data gaps or areas for improvement can help set goals for enhancing engagement or reporting levels. Safety professionals are dedicated to prevention and continuous improvement. By being proactive, you can always enhance your programs and further protect your employees. Thus, your report should pinpoint key areas for action in the foreseeable future.

KPA Helps Businesses Embrace a Data-Driven Approach to Safety

KPA simplifies data visualization and reporting, giving users easy access to actionable insights into their EHS program performance. Your data is presented in real-time, so no delay or extra steps are required to access the information. The dashboards are configured based on features tailored to your business’s unique requirements, giving you the power to make informed decisions that impact workplace safety. Let KPA show you how to take a data-driven approach to safety.