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['Safety and Health Programs and Training']
['Safety and Health Programs and Training']
01/16/2024
Copyright 2024 J. J. Keller & Associate, Inc. For re-use options please contact copyright@jjkeller.com or call 800-558-5011.
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Benchmarking has been a staple in the business world for many years, but today it’s increasingly being applied to occupational safety and health. Simply stated, benchmarking is the process of looking at and adapting best practices and/or processes from other companies so that you can improve your performance.
Why should you benchmark?
There are many reasons why safety benchmarking is beneficial for a company. By investing some time to research and benchmark, you can:
- Find out the “best practice” way of doing a job,
- Avoid reinventing the wheel,
- Get new ideas, and
- Analyze your current processes.
Best practices
The most basic benefit of benchmarking is finding out what’s the best way to do a job. In other words, if you don’t know what the target is, you can’t compare yourself against it.
For example, if your plant manager wants to know how the company is doing from an injury standpoint, it’s probably not enough to know that your incidence rate is 2.1. Or even that you’ve lowered the incidence rate from 3.5 to 2.1 in the past two years. To be effective, you also need to know where other companies in your industry segment stand. If these other companies’ rates are around 4.8, then maybe you are performing OK. But, what if these other companies are at .2? That’s another story and you may have some work to do.
Naturally, we all want to work toward an incident-free workplace, but if you are not there yet, you need to understand where you are. And, one way to help do that is to benchmark. Keep in mind, benchmarking incidence rates is only one measurement. There are many others that you can focus on. In fact, some safety professionals prefer to rely more on leading indicators, such as number of training sessions conducted, rather than lagging indicators, such as incidence rates.
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Another benefit of benchmarking is that it keeps you from “reinventing the wheel.” Why spend your time and company money when someone else has already found a solution, and maybe even more efficiently and cheaper?
A good example of this can be seen by looking at safety incentives. Let’s say that you talk to a colleague about his successful incentive program and he tells you that he first gave away large cash awards for safe behavior. It turned out that this approach was very ineffective because it lead to bad feelings and unhealthy competition, so he had to retool his program. It’s better to find things that don’t work before you make the same mistake!
Get new ideas
Benchmarking also can help you come up with new ways to do jobs that never occurred to you before, or that you considered but didn’t think it would work.
For example, take two companies that conduct monthly workplace safety inspections. In Company X, the procedure involves giving the completed inspection report to the department supervisor. However, Company X doesn’t have a good record for handling items on the report — and the same items show up in the inspection report month after month.
In the other company, Company Y, the inspection team assigns responsibilities and sets target dates for taking care of items identified on the report. Both the department supervisor and the responsible parties (in many cases, the maintenance department) get a copy of the inspection report. As a result, Company Y doesn’t have too many repeat items showing up on the report month after month.
When Company X learns about Company Y’s standard procedures for following up on inspections, it can implement the new procedures and may see substantial improvements in the number of items resolved from the inspection list.
Look at your current processes
Another benefit of benchmarking is that it forces you to look at how you’re doing things now. This in and of itself can lead to improvements. Just like a safety audit, anytime you are taking a close look at a process — which is necessary for benchmarking — you will undoubtedly notice possibilities for improvement.
What should you benchmark?
What should you benchmark? Some common areas to benchmark include:
- Management – This includes such things as culture, goals, and vision. Why is it that Company XYZ had no resistance to implementing a behavior-based safety process, while Company ABC was met with a lot of resistance and negativity?
- Existing processes – This includes preventive maintenance, training, communications, and auditing. Why is it that Company X hasn’t had an incident involving lack of training or understanding where Company Y has had 10 such incidents this year?
- Programs – Incentive programs, motor vehicle safety, and return-to-work are common examples. Why is it that supervisors in Company X cooperate with the return-to-work program, where as in Company Y they don’t?
- Hazards – Hazards relate to types of equipment, chemicals, and behaviors. Why is it that Company X’s process uses a different chemical than company Y’s?
- Targets – This includes such things as first aid cases, near misses, and incidents. Why does Company X have a higher number of near misses than Company Y, but a lower number of injuries?
- New processes – One of the best ways to use benchmarking is when you are implementing a new process. In this regard, you can save time and money by avoiding mistakes that others have made or implementing methods that worked well for others.
Types of benchmarking
You can compare your operations against:
- Internal measures. For instance, you could work with the safety staff at another company location or branch.
- External measures. In this case, you are turning to other companies to see how they perform similar operations.
Whether you choose internal or external benchmarking may depend on the size of your company. If you are part of a large organization, it will be easier to find partners both within your company (internal benchmarking) and outside (external benchmarking). Small companies typically need to look outside.
There are advantages and disadvantages to internal and external benchmarking.
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Copyright 2024 J. J. Keller & Associate, Inc. For re-use options please contact copyright@jjkeller.com or call 800-558-5011.